Ms. Hardgrove
Financial Accounting
5 November 2013
Xerox’s Accounting Scandal
Xerox Corporation is a multinational American document management corporation which sells and produces a wide variety of color and black-and-white printers, multifunction systems, photo copiers, scanners, fax, digital production printing presses, and related consulting services and supplies. Overall any type of printing equipment, more specifically office equipment. It is currently headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut since 2007 when it moved from Stamford, Connecticut. Even though its largest population of employees is based around Rochester, New York, (city in which the company was founded). One of the company’s major steps in the last decade has been the acquisition of Affiliated Computer Services which was announced in September 2009 and closed its deal on February 2010, the acquisition was for $6.4 billion. Xerox is a corporation that although is headquartered in Connecticut it extends its services and sells its products worldwide in 130 countries.
Xerox’s researchers and its Palo Alto Research Center were the ones responsible for inventing several important elements of personal computing, such as the desktop metaphor GUI, the computer mouse, and desktop computing. These features caught the attention by the then board of directors, so well, that they ordered Xerox engineers to share them with Apple technicians. The features were taken on by Apple and, eventually, Microsoft. Partially thanks to these features, these two firms (Apple, Microsoft) are now the ones that are pretty much controlling the personal computing world.
On June 5, 2003, six Xerox senior executives accused of securities fraud settled their issues with the SEC and neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing. As stated by SEC the charges included; “aiding and abetting Xerox's violations of the reporting, books and records and internal control provisions of the federal securities laws.” The Company received...