Juniper to Restate Earnings Due to Options Timing

The shadow of the options-backdating scandal lengthened over Juniper Networks with the company’s announcement Thursday that it will restate some past financial results.

The networking vendor’s financial statements on periods since Jan. 1, 2003 shouldn’t be relied upon, Juniper said in a Form 8-K filed to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday.

The audit committee of Juniper’s board of directors has been conducting a probe into the company’s stock-option practices that found Juniper changed the grant dates of stock options. The board has now concluded the company will have to restate some results to account for charges related to the option grants. It doesn’t yet know the amount of the charges or what periods need to be restated.

Juniper is the main rival to Cisco Systems in the service-provider router business and makes network security products. It is one of the biggest in a string of high-tech vendors that has run into trouble over the way it awarded stock options to employees. In backdating, a company changes the date when an option grant was made, usually to produce a bigger windfall when the stock is sold.

Juniper also told the SEC it missed the deadline for filing its Form 10-Q for the second quarter, which ended June 30. In a release on Thursday, the Sunnyvale, Calif., company said it would resolve the issue and file its Form 10-Q as soon as it can.

-Stephen Lawson, IDG News Service (San Francisco Bureau)

Check out our CIO News Alerts and Tech Informer pages for more updated news coverage.