Embattled multi-level marketing giant USANA Health Sciences (NASDAQ: USNA) hosted a quarterly earnings conference call on Wednesday that was questionable on a multitude of levels. The analysts continued to play the role of lap dog, failing to ask a single tough question. When I spoke with Certified Fraud Examiner and USANA critic Tracy Coenen about the call, she joked "Do you think the analysts are secretly USANA distributors?"

During the call, USANA management claimed that 88% of its distributors sign up because they want the products, not because they want to build a business. But the company declines to disclose its attrition rates -- the number of distributors who fail and leave the company each year. In fact, USANA's CEO wrote to the FTC to say that a proposed rule requiring network marketing companies to disclose their attrition rates would harm the company's ability to recruit.

According to Barry Minkow and the Fraud Discovery Institute's report, "Clearly, disclosure of failure rates is important when potentially 90% of the distributors (who bring in 86% of the company's direct selling revenue) will collapse within a 12-month period. Moreover, if USANA wants to fight the FTC on disclosing these statistics to distributors, so be it. However, the lawful thing to do (and that which the company should have done) is to disclose these pertinent issues to investors."

I certainly agree with Mr. Minkow on that point, but here's what I don't understand: If only 12% of USANA distributors sign up with the intent of building a business, why is that attrition rate so high, and why won't the company disclose it?

I made several phone calls to USANA's investor relations yesterday and was told that the representative did not have an answer and would call me back later. I never heard back. I left a message with CFO Gil Fuller, and did not hear back.