Olympus officials admitted that management had hidden unrealized investment losses dating back to the 1990s and that, in 2008, the company used a series of overpriced acquisitions to hide these losses. The goodwill in some of these acquisitions was then quickly written down to conceal the losses (Stempel and Cruise 2011). An interesting aspect of this case is that the financial statement fraud occurred when management used fraudulent accounting to conceal unrealized losses, which do not appear to have been caused by illegal or inappropriate business activities. Instead of reporting material non-operating losses on securities investments, Olympus created unconsolidated entities to purchase these securities from it at book value. Management then executed a series of transactions among a complex web of related entities, essentially converting the unrealized losses into fees and goodwill. Olympus’ independent auditors later required the write off of most of this goodwill. So, in essence, these very costly schemes converted unrealized investment losses into fee expense and losses reported as write offs of goodwill.
In December 2011, Olympus filed five years of restated financial statements plus overdue first-half results, revealing a $1.1 billion hit to its balance sheet.