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Monthly Archives: September 2016

We have distilled decades of experience at the intersection of law, business and finance into a suite of articles to help our clients make sense of business valuation, forensic accounting, and litigation support. Please visit our site regularly for our latest content.

Detecting Financial Statement Fraud

Posted in Financial Advisory, on Sep 2016, By: Mark S. Gottlieb

Recently, Bloomberg reported that Fiat Chrysler Automobiles is under investigation for potential securities fraud after being accused of inflating U.S. car sales. The company is said to have coordinated a scheme in which individual dealers were paid to create false sales reports, thereby exaggerating financial performance and deceiving investors. Unfortunately, instances of fraudulent financial reporting such as this one have become somewhat commonplace among corporations under pressure to meet earning expectations or to conceal declining financial performance. Fraudulent financial reporting is any intentional misstatement of, or omission from, the financial statements of a company with the purpose of misleading the statement users. The complexity of financial statement fraud has garnered significant attention over the past decade.  It has become clear that there are a variety of subtle methods used to manipulate expenses and revenues that are not easy to detect without knowledge of the necessary analytical tools. In 2002, following a series of major corporate financial fraud scandals, Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act which enacted strict reforms to financial reporting standards in the hopes of protecting investors from potential fraudulent accounting activities. In spite of these new standards, the number of fraud cases, as well as the dollar value of false financial reporting’s, has continued to rise for the past 14 years. Most cases of financial statement fraud take the form of either improper revenue recognition, misstatement of assets, liabilities or expenses. It is nearly impossible to trace the source of every revenue stream, verify the existence of all reported […]


Weighting Different Methods To Determine Value

Posted in Business Valuation, on Sep 2016, By: Mark S. Gottlieb

Unity Technologies, a previously nondescript software development company, has grown significantly in value over the past few months with the release of the viral mobile app, Pokémon Go, which was created using Unity’s software. The company has recently been valued at around $1.5 billion. This consensus comes from an amalgamation of different data including the company’s past financial performance, trends in the market, and the company’s owned resources. In performing this or any other valuation one needs to decide the relevancy of each type of data. For instance, Unity’s past performance may be a good prediction of the company’s potential but does not account for the growing market for programs that produce augmented reality, an area in which Unity specializes. These considerations are an important aspect of business valuation. In a typical business valuation, the analyst will often use three general valuation approaches: (1) the income approach, (2) the market approach, and (3) the asset approach. Each of these approaches uses different data to estimate the value of the subject company, which inevitably results in slight disparities between the outcomes. In order to come to a consensus on value, the analyst must decide how to weight each outcome. There is no official formula for calculating weights in business valuation. In fact, Revenue Ruling 59-60 of the Internal Revenue Code states: “Because valuations cannot be made on the basis of a prescribed formula, there is no means whereby the various applicable factors in a particular case can be assigned mathematical weights in […]