Michael Simonte
Management
Rod, this is Mike. Yes, we were aware of the accounting to reduce the accrual during the course of 2014, and of course that was particularly true in the third quarter. I think what we tried to communicate this morning is that one of our locations, as it turns out based on a review of the documentation, inadvertently overstated the accruals and understated income in prior periods. Now, plant finance thought that these accruals were needed and appropriate to cover items such as open requisitions for plant maintenance and service projects, and Rod, also customer charge-backs for quality issues and premium freight. Some of these issues, particularly the customer charge-backs, can age for a while until they can be resolved by mutual agreement. As you know, we cleaned up quite a bit of our operating situation and also the commercial impacts with our customers in 2014. We got our Mexican operations back to a six-day schedule. We cleaned up all of our past dues, and we had a very good year, as David mentioned, from a quality standpoint. In this case, the accounting documentation that our plant finance team relied on to support the accruals, and more importantly to support matching of the accruals to activity that we were experiencing in 2014, this documentation was not properly prepared and certainly not maintained over time properly, so when the auditors reviewed how the ’14 activity was matched to the accruals, the documentation didn’t hold up. That was true even though we had activity passing through our financial statements this year, as we will for any year, that relates to the resolution of estimates and other contingencies and of course other projects that may have been started in a prior year. So Rod, listen, it’s our job to get this right. We thought this activity was being matched up in the normal course of business. We know how to do this right. We failed to do so there in the third quarter, and so we are communicating as openly and transparently as we can about the thing today to make sure that you understand what happened, you understand that we take it very seriously to get this stuff right. We’ve made the appropriate adjustments and we’ll continue to make full and transparent disclosure of the issues that caused our income statement to be affected, or for that matter any other financial statement to be affected by unusual items each quarter.