SURVEY SHOWS 87 PERCENT OF CEOs FAIL CANDOR TEST

NEW YORK, June 3 — The 2003 Rittenhouse Rankings(TM) of annual report shareholder letters found that 87 percent of the CEOs failed to candidly report their bottom-line performance.

The candor test created for the Rittenhouse Survey required CEOs to:

1. Include the diluted earnings per share (EPS) numbers for prior and current years.

2. Match these EPS numbers to those in the income statements.

3. Explain the difference between GAAP and non-GAAP EPS.

4. Clearly explain significant year-over-year variances in EPS.

"CEOs are well compensated for attending to the bottom-line performance of their companies," said L.J. Rittenhouse, President of andBEYOND Communications. "As companies spend millions of dollars to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley, it is alarming that only 13 percent of the CEOs in our survey met this simple test of forthright investor communication."

Rittenhouse, whose firm conducts an annual survey of disclosure in annual report letters from Fortune 500 companies, added "Companies that offer generalities without meaningful and straight-forward explanations will never restore investor trust."

For the past five years, the Rittenhouse Rankings(TM) Survey has found a positive correlation between candid communication and superior stock price performance. Top-ranked companies in the Survey increased their share prices over a two year period by 21.5 percent, while bottom-ranked companies saw only a 7.3 percent increase.

Although half of the CEO letters in the Survey provided at least one financial performance measure, there was no clear attempt to link this to the bottom line. Seven percent of the CEO letters omitted all discussion of financial results.

A standard best practice comes from the 16 year record held by Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett who begins his letter by reporting on the year's per share performance, compares this to the performance of the S&P 500 Index and calculates the compounded growth rate over the more than 30 years since he took over the business.

Companies Meeting Candor Standards:

1. Alltel
2. Cisco Systems
3. ConAgra
4. Dow Chemical
5. Dow Jones
6. Estee Lauder
7. General Mills
8. Jack in the Box
9. Kimberly-Clark
10. Knight Ridder
11. Pfizer
12. Sherwin-Williams
13. Wells Fargo

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