by Michael Tarsala
If you don’t know them already, allow me to introduce you to the Grumpy Old Accountants.
Two accounting professors — Anthony Catanach Jr. at Villanova, and J. Edward Ketz at Penn State — have been running a blog by that name for about a year now.
Keep it on your reading list.
These old dudes will teach you a thing or three about financial reporting. They’ll make you a smarter investor. And they’ll point out red flags as they see them, no holds barred.
In just the past year, Catanach and Ketz have filed two whistleblower complaints to the SEC. They were early critics of Groupon’s books, ahead of its IPO. They’ve raised concerns about Chesapeake Energy, and more than a dozen other companies.
Plus, they are taking on the Big 4 when it comes to the quality of company audits.
They take a lot of heat. They sometimes are discredited and face legal threats when they are critical of what they see as poor or unclear financial reporting. And they say that their schools have been pressured to hush them up.
For what it’s worth, I hope they stay grumpy.
I think these guys could be making a lot more money keeping their research to themselves and shorting the market. But they would rather do what they have doing for years: Teach.
