[Goldman Sachs] moved its fiscal year up a month and simply left out its losses from December, which is now known as an ‘orphan month’. Is the rule that says a year has twelve months also open to subjective judgment?
Sue, a CPA / CFE who will soon have a Masters in Taxation says, “I’ve never heard of this before and would be surprised if it is legal to entirely omit a month by changing the year end. Because then companies could dump all the bad stuff into that month and pretend everything is fine.”
Which might well be precisely what happened.