Deficient Veritas delays year-end fiscal report

This feels so familiar

By Ashlee Vance in Chicago • Get more from this author

Posted in Storage, 1st April 2005 06:27 GMT

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Veritas has delayed the filing of its year-end financial forms with a US regulator after discovering "controls over financial reporting" that were not up to snuff.

Veritas hopes to hand in the 10-K filing for 2004 to the US Securities and Exchange Commission by April 11. It had previously looked to meet an already extended deadline of March 31. This extension was designed to give its auditor KPMG time to review the filing.

The storage software maker was a bit vague in describing the "controls" issues.

"The company has now determined that the aggregation of its control deficiencies, which include two significant deficiencies, constitute a material weakness," Veritas said. "One of the significant deficiencies relates to the company's controls over its order entry processes, while the other relates to its review of multiple element software license transactions."

Veritas did not return repeated calls seeking comment.

It does not expect the issues or the filing delay to necessitate a change to past financial reports.

Financial reporting has not always been Veritas' strength. Last year, it restated financial data from 2002 and 2003. The year before that it tweaked figures from 2000 and 2001. The company's CFO was canned as well in 2002 after lying on his resume. ®