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Strategies & Market Trends : The Epic American Credit and Bond Bubble Laboratory -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mishedlo who wrote (53262)	2/9/2006 3:46:46 PM
From: ild	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110194

Debt recovery that ASFI, PRAA and a few others do is very complex business. They try to squeeze blood a stone (collect uncollectible debt). What I know is that a huge amount of new business is moving in their direction.

To: mishedlo who wrote (53262)	2/9/2006 3:52:20 PM
From: ild	Respond to of 110194

Probably this is what you were talking about marketwatch.com Among the issues, as money manager and ex-bankruptcy attorney Fiz Zucchi points on Minyanville.com: There's a possibility when the company releases results that it'll be forced to acknowledge that receivables waiting to be collected as future revenue were "vaporized" in the wake a mad-rush to file Chapter 7 liquidations before new bankruptcy laws went into effect in October. Other than normal risk-factor disclosures in its SEC filings, the company has been mum on the subject, and for good reason: It wouldn't necessarily know until 30 to 45 days after the filings, "or perhaps later, if the courts were backed up," Zucchi says. EDIT: My take: Fiz Zucchi assumes that PRAA, ASFI business people are idiots. This is not the case. BK bill was telegraphed well in advance. PRAA, ASFI were ready.

To: mishedlo who wrote (53262)	2/9/2006 4:19:16 PM
From: shades	Respond to of 110194

=DJ SEC's Cox Cites Income Tax Disclosure Problem . WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)--A large percentage of "material weaknesses" in smaller companies' financial reports stems from income tax reporting problems, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox said Thursday. "It isn't the SEC's role to judge whether a company has determined the correct tax treatment," Cox told the Tax Council Policy Institute in a videotaped address. "But it is our job to ensure that the description of that tax treatment is in plain English." Cox told a gathering of top corporate tax officials and accountants that close to one-third of companies with material weaknesses in their internal controls cite income tax accounting as one of their issues. These problems arose in "Section 404 audits" of companies internal controls, which stem from the Sarbanes Oxley Act, a major corporate reform law enacted after the Enron Corp. collapse. Cox said about 80% of the companies with these income tax-related material weaknesses involves small and medium-sized firms, or those with under $500 million in revenues. Companies of this size generally don't have significant in-house tax staffs and rely on outside auditors for tax advice, he said. More generally, Cox said both the SEC and Financial Accounting Standards Board "have joined together in a war on complexity." "Together, we're working to rein in the number of accounting pronouncements that are made by different sources," Cox said. He added the SEC staff also supports the primary objective of the FASB's project on Uncertain Tax Positions. One goal of this project is "to reduce the excessive variation in the manner that companies account for uncertain tax positions." FASB Chairman Robert Herz, who spoke later, agreed. "We have to modernize the whole system of how information is delivered" on financial statements, he said. Existing computer technology could allow an investor to click on an electronic version of a financial statement that would link top-line revenue numbers to sales figures of particular products, he said. -By Rob Wells, Dow Jones Newswires; 202-862-9272; Rob.Wells@dowjones.com