In this segment from the Motley Fool Money podcast, host Chris Hill is joined by Jason Moser of Million Dollar Portfolio, David Kretzmann of Hidden Gems Canada, and Aaron Bush of Motley Fool Rule Breakers to discuss the recent accounting woes at WageWorks (WAGE +0.00%). The provider of employee benefit plans has launched an investigation after reporting it inflated some of its profit and revenue figures. As a result, the CEO, CFO, and general counsel have all left the company -- a major loss of leadership at a critical time.
A full transcript follows the video.
This video was recorded on April 6, 2018.
Chris Hill: WageWorks making headlines this week, and not the good kind. The CEO and Chief Financial Officer of the employee benefits company are gone, following an internal investigation that found WageWorks inflated some of their profit and revenue numbers. Jason, this used to be one of your stocks.
Jason Moser: You know, Chris, I like to dabble with watercolors. And one thing I've found in watercolor is, very often, less is more. You can really do a lot more with the painting with less. In the case of executive leadership, really, less is not more. And when we look at what's going on here, CEO Joe Jackson, out. CFO, just retired. Senior Vice President, General Counsel, gone. I mean, this company has lost a lot of leadership in a short period of time. A little bit of an exodus there. This leads one to believe that maybe leadership made some big mistakes here, and I think the restatements speak to that as well.
Yeah, WageWorks is a company that I had followed for a long time, was never fully convicted one way or the other, and ultimately came down on the side of, "I'm going to need to take a pass on this company." That happened before any of this restating stuff. Really, my challenge with this company, it's a difficult sell, the products that they're selling in flex spending accounts and things like that, tax-benefited accounts for employees. I think the biggest problem there is, you speak with an employee, you explain to someone why they need to sign up for a flex spending child care account, and you just lost them when you said flex spending child care account. It's not simple. There's a lot of friction. It's a good program, but I think this really speaks to why they have such a big pool of potential employees to sign up, but why they don't actually sign up a lot of those employees. It's tough to communicate the value proposition, while there is one. And I think that WageWorks is going to continue to face this challenge, even with new CEO Edgar Montes taking over the reins.
