Equifax faces probe, more costs resulting from breach
Equifax has incurred $87.5 million of expenses stemming from a massive data breach earlier this year and faces dozens of government investigations as a result, the credit reporting company said Thursday.
Equifax disclosed in September that attackers had used a flaw in its website software to extract the personal information of as many as 145.5 million Americans. The stolen data included names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses and driver’s license numbers.
The company has been reeling ever since. Equifax said Thursday its third-quarter profits fell to $96.3 million, down 27 percent from the same period last year.
While Equifax’s third-quarter sales increased slightly, to $834.8 million, they fell short of analysts’ expectations.
“We recognize that we have an important journey in front of us to regain the trust and confidence of consumers and our business customers,” Paulino do Rego Barros Jr., the company’s interim chief executive, said in a statement.
Government drops suit against nursing homes
Just one week after Justice Department lawyers argued a national nursing-care provider had bilked Medicare out of millions of dollars in unnecessary services, government lawyers are now moving to drop their lawsuit entirely.
Toledo, Ohio-based HCR ManorCare, which operates more than 270 skilled nursing facilities across the country, was accused of abusing the Medicare rules to overbill the government, sometimes by putting frail and dying patients through arduous rehabilitation programs unnecessarily.
The lawsuit, which has been working its way through the courts since 2009, was first filed by a whistleblower who worked for ManorCare and the Justice Department stepped in in 2015.
Last month, the government’s case took a severe blow when a federal magistrate ruled the government’s key witness could not testify because a judge said the witness lied in a deposition and that government lawyers failed to turn over important documents to ManorCare’s lawyers.
The judge, Teresa Carroll Buchanan, called the government’s case a “house of cards.”
“I’m appalled, and I’m embarrassed. I’m ashamed that the Justice Department would rely on this kind of nonsense to get involved in a case and cost these defendants millions of dollars in legal fees,” Buchanan said.
Macy’s sales fall, Kohl’s profit drops
Macy’s sales fell as it had a hard time pulling shoppers through its doors and Kohl’s reported a drop in quarterly profit Thursday, underscoring just how challenging the holiday shopping season will be for department store chains. Even Nordstrom saw a key sales measure fall and trimmed its outlook.
Macy’s Inc. reported its third-quarter earnings more than doubled as it cut costs, which include eliminating jobs, scaling back on inventory and closing some locations.
At Kohl’s Corp., hurricanes and unseasonal weather weighed on sales, but it did have a strong back-to-school shopping season and it raised its outlook for the year. Same-store sales edged up 0.1 percent, better than the 0.6 percent decline analysts had expected.
J.C. Penney is scheduled to report its quarterly results today.