The "35 day month" was the basis of "$2.2 billion in accounting fraud" regarding "events regarding an accounting scandal that started in 2002" at

Computer Associates CA Technologies, formerly known as CA, Inc. and Computer Associates International, Inc., is an American multinational corporation headquartered in New York City. It is primarily known for its business-to-business (B2B) software with a product po ...

. The company's "books were routinely kept open until revenues exceeded projected goals." Specifics were described as "a scheme to inflate sales and profits by pretending lucrative contracts were signed earlier than, in fact, they had been. To support this violation of law, faxes of contracts were "cleaned up ... by removing time stamps .." The most immediate impact was that it "cost investors hundreds of millions of dollars," although unlike the matters of

Worldcom MCI, Inc. (subsequently Worldcom and MCI WorldCom) was a telecommunications company. For a time, it was the second largest long-distance telephone company in the United States, after AT&T. Worldcom grew largely by acquiring other telecommunic ...

and

Enron Enron Corporation was an American energy, commodities, and services company based in Houston, Texas. It was founded by Kenneth Lay in 1985 as a merger between Lay's Houston Natural Gas and InterNorth, both relatively small regional companies. ...

, to which it was compared, "Computer Associates - since renamed CA Inc - did not go bankrupt." An overview by the

Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania ( ; also known as Wharton Business School, the Wharton School, Penn Wharton, and Wharton) is the business school of the University of Pennsylvania, a Private university, private Ivy League rese ...

wrote that corporate directors, upon seeing signs of "''35-day month'' ... the three-day window'' ... (and) ''flash period''" "should be especially vigilant."

Named CA personnel

* Former CEO

Sanjay Kumar (business executive) Sanjay Kumar (born 1962) is the former chairman and CEO of Computer Associates International (now CA Technologies), serving from 2000 until April 2004. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison in connection with the 35 day month accounting sca ...

, who served time and paid penalties * Former sales executive Stephen Richards (business executive) * Former CA general counsel Steven Woghin, sentenced to two years. Reporting at the time added "other former executives have been indicted or fired;" "several... have pleaded guilty to criminal charges."

References

Accounting scandals Fraud History of finance Corporate crime {{Crime-stub