Down 18% yesterday, up 9% today.
Jackson Hewitt. They are a tax preparer. Yesterday, the DOJ and IRS accused a few of the franchisees (125 out of 6500 locations), all owned by the same guy, of falsifying income tax returns on a fairly large scale (around 1000 returns per location in 2006).
It's unclear how much the tax preparers did to aid the cheating: they could have recommended some illegal deductions, or could have overlooked falsified records provided to them by the customers.
If any of you are familiar with the business (I'm not), what I'm interested in knowing is, what is the potential, and probable, liability of the parent company monetarily and in damage to their reputation. The commentary on Yahoo has, as usual, run the gamut from "it's an isolated issue and the customers who provided falsified records are liable" to "Nobody will want to use them any more" and "Where there's smoke there's fire. This is another Enron."
Jackson Hewitt. They are a tax preparer. Yesterday, the DOJ and IRS accused a few of the franchisees (125 out of 6500 locations), all owned by the same guy, of falsifying income tax returns on a fairly large scale (around 1000 returns per location in 2006).
It's unclear how much the tax preparers did to aid the cheating: they could have recommended some illegal deductions, or could have overlooked falsified records provided to them by the customers.
If any of you are familiar with the business (I'm not), what I'm interested in knowing is, what is the potential, and probable, liability of the parent company monetarily and in damage to their reputation. The commentary on Yahoo has, as usual, run the gamut from "it's an isolated issue and the customers who provided falsified records are liable" to "Nobody will want to use them any more" and "Where there's smoke there's fire. This is another Enron."