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Groupon seems to have a history of questionable bookkeeping. HN community saw this( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3270165 http://news.ycombinator.com/ite

• byrneseyeview 15y ago
  There were some questions about Groupon's accounting in the past, but the numbers Groupon initially released were actually a) more conservative, and b) harder to game, than the numbers they ended up using. Their current financial statements are confusing in part because their customer acquisition costs are so volatile; when they showed operating income excluding that number, it was way easier to see how fast the underlying business was growing.