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To: Sr K who wrote (91067)	10/2/2007 8:00:58 AM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

cookie jar accounting was used in the entire software industry and most of the tech companies doing b2c business to consumer sales. In software the reason you did it is because if you sold a 10 million dollar software package like SAP, half is due up front and the second half partially through the implementation, with a "signoff" at the end of delivery (even though they have already paid for it but they can refuse to sign and get their money back) which led to incredibly lumpy revenue especially if you had a new product release where everybody was upgrading. Without cookie jar accounting, companies like peoplesoft would have done 100m in one quarter and 30 million the next and 90 million the next with the potential for a negative revenue quarter at any time. So analysts preferred cookie jar accounting and investors are supposed to look at cash flow. But now the feds which are really overreaching in a lot of these cases (although maybe not cendant) are calling some of this stuff fraud. Thats how the backdated options are, companies have always chosen the lowest date of the quarter for employee option plans, this has been true for 30 years- I don't know why they were never expensed but they never were at any company pre-sox but they are locking up execs with criminal intent now because of this. I don't think you can have criminal intent for a 30 yr old business practice but it doesn't matter. Anyway the reason I was looking at this cendant case is the guy got TWO mistrials which to me usually means some ambiguity but finally on try #3 he gets 14 years, seems like another vindictive jury to me.