First, with respect to GAAP, i never meant to imply that Sarbanes-Oxley was the sole regulatory document regarding financial disclosures. If it read that way, i apologise for my lack of clarity.

I do not recall analysts having buddy-buddy relationships with Enron. I do recall Enron having fairly acrimonious relationships with analysts including a famous incident where an Enron executive called an analyst an asshole during a quarterly report meeting because the analyst had the audacity to ask them if they could provide transparency to their books that was more in line with what every other company in the United States provided (he asked for a balance sheet).

I recall Enron having a very buddy-buddy relationship with Arthur Anderson (who was supposed to be their independent auditor) and I recall Arthur Anderson being convicted of fraud and obstruction of justice (they destroyed documents) and losing their license to practise (which ended the company). I do not recall any analysts being charged or convicted of fraud in relation to Enron (which certainly would have happened if they had been part of a pump and dump scheme).

It is important to remember that the financial statements from enron were complete lies. Any inside information an analyst could have gotten would have been incredibly negative to the company because they were reporting significant profits while actually losing massive amounts of money. Any analyst who had inside information and continued to recommend the stock was absolutely committing a major crime.

Enron had no need to lie privately to select analysts to pump their stock because they were lying publicly to all of the analysts to pump their stock.

So I just took a look through the Sarbanes-Oxley act itself (a quick glance, i didnt read the whole thing). I see section 302 which discusses executive accountability for for periodic filings made under the Securities Exchange Act (quarterly and annual filings). I don't see anything about non-SEC related statements, like press releases. I think your company's rules regardings press statements are a good idea, but are corporate policy, not legal requirement.

However you still fail to grasp sell through to consumer, Sell through to retailer and purchase agreements all of which feed into how a company spins what is sold and what is not by a company trying to dress up something. You seem to take there numbers as sold whenin fact a company used to report product in the warehouses as sold if retailers had agreed to purchase them. The level of standard is not there in PR releases and yes they can round up and it happens all of the time in business. I have sat through plenty of IP cases where numbers were rounded up  and down in PR releases as long as it was legitimately rounded up. In other words if they sold 19.87 mllion they will say 19.9 million. 5 million is NOT a precise number the number they released was rounded be up or down it was rounded if only by a little. You seem far to intelligent not to understand that concept.

Secondly when Jack Trettons quote was

"If you can find a PS3 anywhere in North America that's been on shelves for more than five minutes, I'll give you 1200 bucks for it."

within 5 minutes there were hundreds of pictures of stacks of PS3s on the internet from all diffirent sources. This was on Feb 10th 2007 almost 2 months after it was easily and readily available and the beginning of the Wii hype machine. So no your answer to that does not fly. It is also a bold way of expressing we ship and sell.

Also for a person who is such a numbers person to discount tracking and to only go by corporate PR releases is astounding being that tracking is based entirely around numbers. GfK, NPD, Chart Track, Famitsu, and Media Create are all independant and professional tracking agencies. VGchartz is also very good tracking site as well. It is true that the numbers from these sources cannot be taken as solid for a single week or day but as time goes on the outliers that affect these numbers even out that is the beauty of margin of error and also the bell curve.

One last thing all people are saying here is that Fiscal reports are a good thing they are accurate and not estimated nor rounded. they are also very clear and broken down. PR statements are controlled and only reveal what is expressly written.

Dont disagree with the boss!

Interesting chat guys,with civilian taste.

This shows how themes could be talked without fanboyism.

Enron discriminated against analysts the did not support the company valuation. They released information to friendly analysts and blocked and pressured the unfriendly. They blocked the analysts access to information and pressured the analyst firm and parent firms. 

Here are some headlines:

MERRILL REPLACED RESEARCH ANALYST WHO UPSET ENRON

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B07E5DD1138F933A05754C0A9649C8B63

Ex Citigroup VP questioned Enron relationship -WJS

http://www.reuters.com/article/companyNews/idUSN2146350820080321

Ex-Analyst at BNP Paribas Warned His Clients in August About Enron

http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/articles/enronsage.htm

"The side benefits to the securities firms can be enormous: If an analyst touts a company's securities, the securities firm stands a greater chance at becoming an adviser to that company, and garnering the fees that will follow. Nowadays, analysts can be stars, receiving bonuses of several hundred thousand dollars for helping their firm to win big underwriting deals. Bash the securities of a corporate client, though, and the securities firm could be shut out of lucrative deals. Enron issued billions of dollars worth of securities in recent years, generating huge fees for its financial advisers and bankers."

To be clear - this is just a small part of their misconduct. The accounting and fraud was a much larger issue.

I am not lawer and never read SOX myself. So you might be right that it is not SOX that govern public disclosure.

I did find however the SEC regulation that governs it and would explain the coporate rules we work with:

http://www.sec.gov/news/extra/endseldi.htm

The short story is that companies cannot guide analysts privately. All of the guidance is done through their SEC filings and through public statements. Therefore the public statements regarding business performance are treated as investment guidance and therefore must be accurate to the level you would guide wall street.

So this is not just "our company rules". This level of prudence is required by SEC regulations.

Just to be clear:

1. The tracking firms are tracking different numbers than the one the companies report. ("Sold to retailers" vs "sold to consumers"). In fact, the companies does not have any visibility to the second measure except through the tracking firms.
2. The numbers that the companies report are accurate. Period. They are not estimates, they are not statistical samples. They are the sales that show up in the corporate accounting system.
3. The numbers reported by the tracking companies are estimates. They are typically based on a big statistical sample and partial access to the reporting system of some of the retailers, but they are still just estimates. That said, they are accurate enough and valueable for the companies to pay for them, but they are still just estimates.
4. There is a mathematical relationship between the numbers reported by the companies (which are very accurate) and the tracking estimates. The sold-to-consumers will always be lower than the sold-to-retailers. Retailers will always have some inventory that was was purchased from the companies but still not sold to the consumers.
5. The tracking companies often adjust their estimates based on the accurate shipment data from the companies. If the shipment numbers are smaller than their own "sellthough to consumers" estimates were then their estimate needed to be adjusted.
6. I found such discrepencies in VGC and pointed them out (up above in the thread) and the responses I got was that the companies were lying in their public statements.
7. I explained in detail that it is illegal to companies to lie in the public statements about their business performance because such public statements can be used as investment guidance.
8. I do this staff for a living. I am no lawer but I am doing PR and analysts work and the rules are clear.
9. Still, it seem that reason fails in this forums. It seems it is much more fun to believe that companies are just a bunch of lying criminals. I can understand the fun part of it, I just hope that with some of the education I provided reason will prevail over fiction.

Enough.

At no point did I insult you or look down on you or say you lacked reason but the mere fact that you can't seem to understand simple principles of spin something that anyone with a decent college education can speak tells me that you are pushing this becausee you want to be right and you may be like the type of person who reads through a book and finds a typo on page 78 and calls up the editor to complain but finds out it is not a type but a neoglism and argues that point beyond reason.

And once again forgive my typo or grammer I have little time to write these at work.

 It sure is...

as long as google works it will continue.