CA launches post-Kumar charm offensive

Scandal-mired software giant Computer Associates has restated two year's worth of earnings and launched a charm offensive in the hope of putting a series of "difficult issues" behind it once and for all.

Speaking in a live webcast, new company chairman Lewis Ranieri, who replaced Sanjay Kumar last week, said the company must now prove it has moved away from a chequered past that left it embroiled in SEC and DoJ investigations into accounting impropriety.

In total the company revealed that $2.2bn of revenue was booked prematurely within fiscal 2000 and 2001. A total of $1.782bn was prematurely recognised in fiscal 2000 and $445m in fiscal 2001. Ranieri attributed the considerable discrepancies to the "poor job" CA did of moving across to its new reporting model.

He said the restatement and sweeping management changes at the top "brings [CA] closer to putting this difficult period behind us."

He said the scandal of the past few years had been "utterly unacceptable and will not happen again" under the company's new management.

In what some may see as a swipe at former CEO and chairman Sanjay Kumar, who presided over the accounting debacle, Ranieri described new interim CEO Kenneth D Cron as bringing "a steady hand and sound judgement" to the company. Ranieri spoke of the need to introduce greater "discipline and integrity" into the post-Kumar CA, while refusing to publicly implicate the deposed CEO in any wrongdoing.

Another appointment announced today saw CFO Jeff Clarke take on the role of chief operating officer - a new position on the CA board.

Clarke will continue to work the finance department and will oversee "significant changes in the finance department", according to Ranieri.

The company also today revealed full details of its compliance with the SEC and DoJ investigations and described an incredibly complicated data trail that proved the undoing of a number of employees implicated in the scandal.

In total the CA investigation processed 1.5 million files, including tens of thousands of emails and 20,000 pages of documents which were handed over to the government.

Ranieri said any employees who did not co-operate with the investigations were asked to resign from the company.

The new chairman added that it is now important to take whatever measures are necessary to ensure such impropriety never darkens the doors of CA again.