- A former senior accountant at Disney has accused the entertainment titan of overstating its revenue by billions of dollars.
- Sandra Kuba alleged that Disney employees recorded nonexistent sales from giveaways and artificially inflated revenue from gift cards.
- She claimed the company's revenue could have been overstated by as much as $6 billion, or 20%, in 2009 alone.
- Disney has dismissed Kuba's claims as "utterly baseless."
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A former senior accountant at Disney has accused the entertainment titan of overstating its revenue by billions of dollars.
Sandra Kuba, who worked at Disney for 18 years, made the claims in whistleblower filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The allegations were reported by Marketwatch, which reviewed the filings and supporting documents. Disney has dismissed the claims as "utterly baseless."
In the filings, Kuba alleged that employees in Disney's parks-and-resorts division recorded nonexistent revenue from free golf rounds and guest promotions. She claimed workers recognized the $500 face value of gift cards as revenue even when guests purchased them at a 20% discount.
They also double-counted revenue from gift cards by recording sales when guests bought them and when they used them and recognized revenue from gift cards that were given to guests free, she alleged.
Kuba told Marketwatch that Disney's revenue could have been overstated by as much as $6 billion — about 20% — in 2009 alone. The parks-and-resorts division accounted for nearly 30% of total revenue that year, according to the group's annual report. Kuba added that flaws in the firm's accounting software helped to hide the revenue manipulation.
Kuba reported the issues to management in 2013, brought them to the attention of a senior executive in 2016, and flagged them to the SEC in August 2017, she told Marketwatch. She was fired about a month later and filed a whistleblower-retaliation complaint with the Department of Labor in October 2017.
Disney told government investigators it fired Kuba because "she displayed a pattern of workplace complaints against coworkers without a reasonable basis for doing so, in a manner that was inappropriate, disruptive, and in bad faith," according to Marketwatch.
Kuba has made two other whistleblower filings since leaving Disney. In June, she alleged that some Disney employees tried to slash the firm's sales tax liabilities by reclassifying revenue from highly taxed items such as hotel rooms as revenue from lower-taxed items such as food and beverages, Marketwatch reported.
"This former employee, who was fired for cause, has persistently made patently false claims for over two years," a Disney spokesperson told Markets Insider.
"The claims she made to the company were thoroughly investigated and found to be utterly baseless. It is unfortunate that MarketWatch, which has been aware of the facts for months, knowingly and deliberately chose to give Ms. Kuba's unfounded claims a platform."
Kuba did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Markets Insider.
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