http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-05/book-cooking-bank-gets-to-keep-cooked-books.html
Here's a not-so-comforting lesson for investors, courtesy of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Just because the SEC says a company's earnings were fraudulent doesn't mean the company will ever be required to correct them.
The SEC this week accused Fifth Third Bancorp of committing accounting fraud during the height of the 2008 financial crisis. The company agreed to pay a $6.5 million penalty to settle the agency's claims.
The funny part: Fifth Third, which is Ohio's largest bank, has never acknowledged to this day that its numbers were in error. The SEC isn't requiring it to do so now. A Fifth Third spokesman, Larry Magnesen, said the company considered whether it needed to do a financial restatement and decided it didn't.
Reasonable people might disagree about whether Fifth Third committed fraud. Per the usual protocol, Fifth Third neither admitted nor denied the SEC's allegations. Yet it's beyond belief that the company never had to set the record straight about its financial statements. Fifth Third first disclosed the SEC's investigation in its 2010 annual report. So the bank has had a few years to revise its figures.
= new reply since forum marked as read