[Jay] Rasulo was asked if he’d rather have five minutes with Federal Reserve Board chairman Janet Yellen or a five-year-old kid who’d just gone to a Disney park for the first time. “That’s an easy one — way too easy,” he said. “I’ve had a million of those conversations with kids and they’re all great. And they’re always honest, which is the best thing.” [CFO]
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Disney CFO: ESPN Will Be Fine If There’s a NFL Lockout
- Caleb Newquist
- March 9, 2011
As the National Football League and the players union continue contract talks, Walt Disney Co. Chief Financial Officer Jay Rasulo was pressed Tuesday to answer questions about how a potential strike or lockout would impact sports juggernaut ESPN. Rasulo expressed confidence that Disney’s lucrative sports network, which has the rights to “Monday Night Football,” could weather the loss of games, telling the audience at Credit Suisse’s Global Media and Communications Convergence Conference that “we’re not that concerned.” [LAT]
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Grant Thornton Survey Shows That CFOs Might Be Ignoring the SEC’s XBRL Deadline
- Caleb Newquist
- May 10, 2010
It has been well established in these pages and elsewhere that the SEC has had its share of problems. Take your pick: 1) missing the biggest financial fraud in the history of the world 2) hiring an army of porn-addicted accountants and lawyers to protect our markets 3) waffling on IFRS 4) did we mention missing huge frauds?
To be fair, the Commission has been working hard to redeem itself by cracking down on dubious activity (from Goldman to Overstock), hiring more fraud experts and giving those tranny porn-obsessed employees a second chance.
Regardless of the turnaround-in-progress, CFOs in this country seem to have ceased taking the SEC seriously. Sure the 10-Ks and Qs still get filed but those were in place long before the wheels fell off.
In a recent survey, Grant Thornton found that, despite a SEC deadline for public companies to utilize eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL), a fair amount of CFOs don’t seem all that worried about reporting their financial statements using the technology:
64 percent of public companies do not currently report financial results using eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL); and of those, half have no plans to in the future even though the SEC mandated that public companies have to report their financials using Interactive Data by 2011.
“It’s concerning that almost a third of public companies still have no plan on using XBRL to report their financials despite the requirement that all public companies comply with XBRL filing requirements by mid-year 2011,” said Sean Denham, a partner in Grant Thornton’s Professional Standards Group and a member of the AICPA’s XBRL Task Force. “I foresee a lot of companies playing catch up as the 2011 SEC deadline approaches.”
Whether this lack of action can be attributed to defiance, fear of technology, or pure laziness is not explained but we wouldn’t rule out the possibility that the SEC has an outright mutiny on its hands.
A third of public companies have no plans to use XBRL – despite SEC mandate requiring XBRL use by 2011 [GT Press Release]
Also see: XBR-Lax [CFO Blog]
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Confidential to Sir David Tweedie: Mary Schapiro Isn’t Hearing Encouraging Words on IFRS
- Caleb Newquist
- June 21, 2011
Speaking at The Wall Street Journal’s annual CFO Network meeting in Washington D.C., Schapiro readily admitted that there isn’t a big push from either multinationals or shareholders to move to international financial reporting standards.
In response to a question from Bank of America’s CFO, Chuck Noski, Schapiro said, “We have not heard from a lot of shareholders that we have to go (to IFRS). We’ve heard the contrary… ‘Why would we take this step toward international accounting standards?’” [CFOJ]