It was only three months ago that RCS Capital Corp. told shareholders in a quarterly report that it was in the process of remediating “several significant deficiencies” in its internal control over financial reporting. Since then, shareholders have been told that all is well — sort of. But the company has not specifically told shareholders that the deficiencies have been addressed and solved.
RCS is the holding company for a collection of brokerage firms and other financial companies. One of them, J.P. Turner Associates, was purchased by RCS this year, and has a horrific history of customer complaints and regulatory action against executives at the top of the company. Here’s my story about Turner.
Along with its bad judgment in picking acquisition targets, RCS also has the baggage of having employed Brian S. Block as its CFO for most of 2013. Block is the guy who resigned under a cloud on Oct. 29 as CFO of American Realty Capital Properties Corp., which announced that he and another senior financial executive had intentionally covered up an accounting error. Both RCS and American Realty Capital Properties are controlled by real-estate mogul Nicholas Schorsch.
On that news, shares of both RCS and American Realty Capital Properties plunged.
Since then, RCS has said publicly that it hired a law firm and forensic accounting firm to examine the books for the first nine months of 2013. That was a period when Block was signing off on the financials. Michael Weil, CEO of RCS, said in a conference call with analysts on Nov. 13 “We consider the question of RCS Capital’s accounting integrity as closed.” But the forensic probe was limited. For example, it didn’t include an examination of emails.
RCS first flagged its accounting deficiencies in its March 31, 2014 quarterly report. It subsequently mentioned the deficiencies in filings on May 6 and May 29. Among other problems, it noted in the May 29 filing that its auditors had been given “multiple versions” of the company’s books and records.
In other words, seven months before Block resigned in the American Realty Capital Properties scandal, RCS was noting significant problems in its accounting during the period Block was its CFO. The company of course could have brought that up in its analyst call last week, and if it was all fixed, management could have said so.
Instead, RCS carved out a nine-month period, authorized a limited investigation, and declared that the issue was closed. To really close it, though, RCS needs to tell what it did about the deficiencies it mapped out in that May 29 filing, and why investors can be assured that problems like that won’t happen again.
RCS, by the way, declined to comment when I sent a detailed list of questions to its outside PR firm. Here’s the story I wrote about it for TheStreet.