It's a story that might have gotten more attention a few years ago, but now Wall Street has become somewhat complacent about accounting/governance issues.
Shares of Dell Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) actually closed up after the company disclosed that it would be restating results for 2003 to Q1 2007 because of various accounting issues, manipulation of numbers at the request of senior executives to meet financial targets.
Some analysts don't care. According to MarketWatch, "Eric Ross, an analyst with ThinkEquity Partners, called the restatement 'meaningless' due to the amounts involved in the restatement periods."
In a way he's right. If all that investors should care about is ROE, EBITDA, and EPS, it doesn't matter. It's not material. But when investing for the long term, we're putting a lot of faith in management, and the fact that company executives were committing fraud ("seeking adjustments so that quarterly performance objectives could be met" = fraud) over a period of four years should hardly be construed as "meaningless."
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