Ahhh Conseco Finance. One of my earliest gigs as an investigator was rounding up contact information for former employees of Coneseco for a securities class action suit. It seems like only yesterday. Maybe because Conseco is still in the hot seat:

...Rollin M. Dick, a former chief financial officer of Conseco Finance Corp., a subsidiary then known as Green Tree Financial, was ordered to pay a $110,000 civil penalty and barred for five years from acting as an officer or director of any public company.

James S. Adams, formerly chief accounting officer, treasurer, and senior vice-president of Conseco, Inc., was ordered to pay a $90,000 civil penalty and barred for five years from acting as an officer or director of a public company.

In an amended complaint, the SEC alleged, among other things, that from March 1999 through February 2000, Conseco and Conseco Finance made false and misleading statements about their earnings in SEC filings and in public statements announcing their earnings, overstating their financial results by hundreds of millions of dollars.

The complaint alleged that this massive overstatement occurred "primarily because Dick and Adams conducted a fraudulent scheme" to avoid huge write-downs of certain assets held by Conseco Finance known as interest-only securities, and corresponding charges to earnings, through the use of improper accounting techniques in violation of generally accepted accounting principles.

The complaint also alleged that Dick and Adams made a variety of improper and unsupported "top-side" adjustments to Conseco Finance's books and records at the end of the first three quarters of 1999 to further inflate Conseco and Conseco Finance's earnings for these quarters in order to meet Wall Street's analysts' consensus earnings targets...

More here.

-- MDT