August 5, 2003
From the desk of Jane Galt:The long road to recovery
State owned Iraqi companies aren't quite up to this capitalism thing yet (subscription required):
To build financial snapshots of the companies, the Americans drew up a questionnaire with 56 items, such as: "Describe current inventory of raw material, including how much you paid for it." The answers weren't very satisfactory. The state tobacco company, like most others, calculates its cash flow and balance sheet only once a year. It gave simple "no" answers to several questions, such as "Do you currently have any accounts receivable from customers?"Posted by Jane Galt at August 5, 2003 3:12 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links
On the bright side, their aging schedule must look really good. I know credit managers that would sell their first born for that kind of DSO.
Sounds like some of my clients -- tho none of my clients has hundreds of millions in assets or billions in sales!(Laugh or Groan out Loud)
BTW -- Generally accepted accounting principles in other countries often differs from US. I read somewhere the Soviet Union generally accepted accounting principles was not interested at all in the income statement or cash flows, but very interested in the assets.Perhaps Iraqi generally accepted accounting principles had a similar misfocus.
Iraq was essentially a Stalinist Communist country. Teaching them business principles is not going to be easy.
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