The Seat and the Voice — 6 of 6
This is the one I have the most reason to leave alone.
There is a public record with my name on it. In 2023 a settled order from the Securities and Exchange Commission named me, as a company’s chief financial officer, in connection with how we reported a single operating number, a subscriber count, for one quarter in 2019. If you search my name, what you find is a short press release. Most people read the four paragraphs and stop, which is what a four-paragraph press release is built to make you do.
For a long time I let them stop there. The alternative felt worse. Explaining sounds like defending, defending sounds like guilt, and silence at least keeps its dignity. But silence also lets one side’s four paragraphs stand as the only version on the record, and I have come to think that is its own quiet dishonesty, the kind you commit against yourself. So I am going to set the fuller account down once, plainly, and then let it rest beside the headline where anyone can weigh both.
The facts are not much in dispute, which is part of the point.
The quarter in question fell during a migration of our billing and counting systems that broke, for a stretch, our ability to count members cleanly. The disputed figure was roughly 2.3 percent of the subscriber count for that one quarter. It was an operational metric, not a financial-statement number. No financial statement of the company was ever alleged to have been misstated, in any period the regulator examined. The finding was negligence. Not fraud, not intent, not concealment. Negligence, which in plain language means the conclusion was that we should have caught something we did not catch.
The settlement was entered on a neither-admit-nor-deny basis. I admitted no facts. No court and no judge ever found a single fact against me, because the facts were never tried. I was not barred from anything. I kept my CPA license. The Commission had no objection to my continuing to serve as an officer or director of a public company going forward. We settled, the company and I, for the reason most people settle with a regulator: litigating it would have cost more years, more money, and more of my life than the matter itself was worth, even believing, as I did and do, that we had the stronger side of the argument. Settling a case you think you could win is a financial decision. It is not a confession, however much a press release wants it read as one.
That is the record. Here is what the record does not carry.
I am not sure most people understand what it is to have the hardest stretch of your professional life compressed into four paragraphs written entirely by the other side, published without anyone on your side reading them first, and then left to stand as the first thing the world learns about you. The actual order, the long document the press release summarizes, reads differently than its own summary. A document written to inform reads differently than a document written to deter. I have made my peace with the fact that far more people will ever read the second kind than the first.
I am not asking anyone to relitigate it, and I am not going to spend the rest of my life as a man explaining a headline. I am doing the one thing that was always within my control: putting the fuller record next to the short one, so the people who care to look have both in hand instead of one. That is the whole content of the word transparency, which, if you have read the rest of this series, you will recognize as the principle I argued for hardest in the seat where all of this began. I believed it then. I am practicing it now, about myself, which is the harder direction to practice it in.
This series has been about one structural position held to its end: accountable for outputs I did not control, standing on a platform I did not own. This is where that position finally came due. The record is the residue of the structure. The story is what I have decided to do with it, on a page that, this time, is mine.