£133million McBlunder
Fat finger blamed for accounts mess
MCDONALD’S has admitted to a ‘fatfinger’ blunder worth £133million.
The fast-food giant stated in its published accounts for 2013 that its UK turnover was worth just under £1.5billion.
That was up a hefty £133m on the previous year, the world’s biggest burger chain reported at the time. But it has now admitted the claimed increase should have been a more modest £1.3m.
As a result, the 2013 turnover figure should have been
reported as being around £1.37bn. The same mistake was made to McDonald’s stated “cost of sales” in the UK for the same year.
But because ‘turnover’ is an income and ‘cost of sales’ is an expense, it meant the error didn’t affect the UK arm’s published annual profit figure of £377.8m.
The fat- finger error emerged in the industry heavyweight’s 2014 accounts, just filed at Companies House, that showed turnover last year jumped to £1.43bn.
A McDonald’s spokeswoman said it was “a simple human error due to the misplacement of a decimal point”.
She insisted the latest accounts were the first opportunity for the firm to highlight the mistake.
She refused to reveal whether the person responsible had been disciplined or was still with the company.
The incident does, however, beg the question of why McDonald’s auditors, EY, didn’t spot the blunder before signing off the accounts. EY declined to comment. It comes as McDonald’s, under the leadership of British-born boss Steve Easterbrook, tries to revive the fortunes of the world’s biggest restaurant chain. In 2014 a fat-finger error by a trader on Japan’s stock market caused more than £370bn worth of orders to be made and then cancelled.