I thought they weren't even going to get audit lined up until January. Assuming they are using a decent auditor it would take three months at a minimum. With the Thanksgiving holiday and the Christmas holidays I would expect the process to take longer.
When I worked with external auditors for a Fortune 100 company it took them weeks to audit books where we had clear processes and things did not change. Nowadays, auditors can be liable for items they missed in the financials. My guess in dealing with private compnaies is that as a private company these guys did not follow GAAP and instead followed cash accounting rules as those basically match tax rules. This probably would not take that long, but then you have to test transactions, etc.
Finally, then you have to review the processes to ensure that you cannot(minimize) fraud. This is ususually the bigger issue with private companies. Controls generally are minimal as it costs time and money and you don't really think about it. Where I work currently we bought a company last year that has over 500 employees; does $200M+ in sales annually, tons of Federal and State regulation (has to file finacials in Every state they do business and go through a review board) and guess how they managed their books. Quickbooks. Period. They had a personal quickbooks account which everyone used the same password, etc. They had no audit abilities. Why is this important. Lets say a person in Accounts Payable schedules a check to be paid to Xerox for $10k for whatever reason. Someone goes in and changes the name to someone else.
My gut tells me we do not see audit results until March or April. I expect a news release in January, maybe a little bigger than the one from before and the stock spikes for a few days and then we drift down as we still are not closer to audited financials. The question to each investor is what is your time worth? Do you have other potential investments that you could deploy the money to?
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