Xerox

Xerox Corp. said yesterday that it would eliminate 2,500 white-collar jobs, or more than 20 percent of the company's total, the middle of next year and take a $175 million pretax charge against earnings in the current quarter to cover the cost.Xerox said the reductions in managerial and support staff would cut its costs by $150 million next year and $200 million in 1993.All the reductions will come from Xerox's document-processing business, which employs 101,000. Production workers, engineers, direct sales and customer service staff will not be affected.

Baltimore officials are refusing to pay the city's former speed and red-light camera operator $2 million for its final three months of work, a period that preceded the troubled start for the new contractor in January. The city stopped issuing tickets from the cameras for weeks because of the rocky transition from the old vendor, Xerox State and Local Solutions, to Brekford Corp. Xerox says it's owed money for services provided in October, November and December, according to Solicitor George Nilson, the city's chief lawyer.

Xerox Corp. is famous, but has a checkered past. It has run the cycle from powerful and innovative to outmoded several times. It has morphed from riches to financially troubled as well. In the 1980s, I covered struggling International Harvester. Its chief executive, Archie McCardell, a previous Xerox president, was frequently blamed for slashing Xerox research and development in a cost-cutting move that improved earnings for a while. But, critics said, those actions crippled Xerox because it ultimately lacked enough new products.

Baltimore City said Tuesday that it will throw out more than 6,000 speed and red-light camera tickets because its former contractor has stopped showing up in court to defend them - the latest sign of the dysfunction dogging Baltimore's speed camera program. City transportation officials say they lack the evidence to fight the appeals on their own. Voiding the tickets means the city is forgoing the chance to collect more than $300,000 in fines. The announcement comes after judges over the past two weeks dismissed 600 speed camera tickets because city lawyers said they had no evidence.

Education Alternatives Inc., the company managing nine Baltimore schools, has named a Xerox Corp. executive to oversee its Baltimore operations, which are under intense political fire and orders from Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke to improve student performance.Ramon Harris, district controller and business manager for the Philadelphia and McLean, Va., offices of Xerox, replaces Philip E. Geiger as divisional president for Maryland.Dr. Geiger, a former schools superintendent in New Jersey, had been reassigned after a year on the job. Test scores in the Tesseract schools did not improve, and some principals said he spent too little time in Baltimore and was demanding more than the schools could deliver.

Education Alternatives Inc., the controversial private company that manages nine Baltimore schools, yesterday tapped a high-ranking Xerox Corp. executive to guide its rapid growth.William F. Goins was named to the No. 2 position at EAI, which recently won a contract to manage the 32 public schools in Hartford, Conn., and is seeking other contracts around the nation. He will assume the newly created position of chief operating officer beginning Jan. 2, reporting directly to chairman John T. Golle.

STAMFORD, Conn. - Xerox Corp. had its credit ratings on about $11 billion in debt cut to below-investment grade yesterday by Moody's Investors Service, a move that will heighten the cash crunch at the world's largest copier company. The company also announced 275 job cuts yesterday. The firings follow 350 administrative staff jobs cut last month. All of the recently announced job cuts are separate from the 5,200 layoffs that the company said in March would be carried out by April 2001.

I am always searching for a good flat-panel monitor, thanks to the many requests I get from family and friends who want to get rid of their cathode ray tube (CRT) monitors, which can take up more than a foot of space behind the screen with the innards. Xerox has leapt into the monitor market with its flat panels, and the 19-inch monitor, XL592Db ($800), that I've been testing really does a solid job of conveying a nice, sharp, colorful picture. The flat screen's maximum resolution is 1,280-by-1,024 pixels, which worked fine at 19 inches.

STAMFORD, Conn. - Xerox Corp. shares fell 20 percent yesterday, dropping to the lowest level in more than 18 years, on concern that the cash crunch at the world's largest copier company may push it toward bankruptcy. The shares fell $1.25 to $5. That's the lowest since August 1982. The shares have dropped 78 percent since the start of the year, erasing about $12.8 billion from Xerox's market value. "It's apparent that the market is factoring in the fact that bankruptcy is in the realm of possibility," said Win Murray, an analyst with Boston-based Liberty Funds Group, which sold its Xerox shares several months ago. "Nobody is assuming that their underlying business is going to save them."

STAMFORD, Conn. -- Xerox Corp. agreed yesterday to sell its insurance unit to Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. for $2.72 billion as it ends its money-losing foray into financial services.Xerox will take a $1.5 billion charge in the 1995 fourth quarter to sell Talegen Holdings Inc. to KKR, a buyout firm. The sale will result in a loss in the quarter for Xerox, which reported year-earlier earnings of $236 million, or $2.07 a share.The company also agreed to sell its money-management group and Talegen subsidiary, First Quadrant Corp.

It seems you are talking from both sides of the issue in your editorial on the new speed camera contract that has been awarded ("Playing fast and loose," Jan. 24). First, you are all over Xerox, the former contract holder, for faulty equipment and issuing tickets to innocent people. Then you call for Brekford Corp.'s head for not having the software to run the same faulty equipment you complained was issuing bogus tickets. Brekford Corp. now has a chance to install their equipment and rectify the mess that Xerox's equipment left our city.

The issues described in the article "Troubled transition shuts down city speed cameras" (Jan. 23) reveals gross mismanagement and poor judgment by the city in its awarding of the speed camera contract. Furthermore, Baltimore City officials repeatedly are quoted with more regret for the shortfall in ticket revenue than for their oft-stated purpose that the cameras are for children's safety. First, the request for proposal required that the awarded vendor must supply all software required to run the equipment.

Baltimore's speed camera contractor disclosed Friday that several of the city's automated cameras have been wrongly ticketing roughly one of every 20 passing cars and trucks. Officials with Xerox State and Local Solutions told a mayoral task force studying the city's program that the five cameras have been idled and are no longer issuing $40 tickets after they found during a recent review that the devices had an error rate of 5.2 percent. Those five cameras have generated at least 15,000 tickets, city records show, translating to $600,000 in potential fines for motorists.

Baltimore City's automated traffic enforcement contractor carried out 189 vehicle test runs past a camera on West Cold Spring Lane but could not determine the cause of erroneous speed readings there, the company said in a letter this week to the city Department of Transportation. "Upon review of the test results, all speed readings were within the expected tolerance without anomalies," wrote Ryan Nicolas, regional manager for Xerox State and Local Solutions. Xerox is now recommending "third-party validation testing" of the camera, Nicolas wrote, and advised the city to paint measured lines on the street so that speeds could be more easily determined with photographs.

Xerox Corp. is famous, but has a checkered past. It has run the cycle from powerful and innovative to outmoded several times. It has morphed from riches to financially troubled as well. In the 1980s, I covered struggling International Harvester. Its chief executive, Archie McCardell, a previous Xerox president, was frequently blamed for slashing Xerox research and development in a cost-cutting move that improved earnings for a while. But, critics said, those actions crippled Xerox because it ultimately lacked enough new products.

In the old days, when he had a real job, Josh Fruhlinger's cubicle stood closer to the copy machine than anybody else's. Whenever the contraption sputtered or jammed, as it did several times a week, co-workers stampeded to his workspace, desperation in their eyes. Just as desperate, he fended them off. "I'd say, `No, no! Just because I sit near the photocopier does not mean I know how to fix it!" said Fruhlinger, now a freelance Web editor who says he works in his pajamas. "The office mentality stirs up its own kinds of psychosis."

STAMFORD, Conn. - Xerox Corp., the largest maker of copying machines, reported yesterday a drop in sales and profit in the second-quarter. The company said a slowing economy will probably delay a return to profitability to the fourth quarter. The company had a loss of $281 million, or 40 cents a share, compared with net income of $202 million, or 27 cents, in the second quarter last year. Sales fell 13 percent from $4.78 billion to $4.14 billion, the company said in a statement. It was the fourth quarterly loss in a row for Xerox.

The board of the Ford Foundation, one of the country's largest private charitable foundations, has decided to keep its chairman despite allegations by federal regulators that he participated in an accounting fraud when he was chairman and chief executive of Xerox Corp. The decision came after the chairman, Paul A. Allaire, agreed to pay a $1 million penalty and forfeit $7.6 million in bonus pay and gains made on stock sales at Xerox and interest on those sums. He was also barred from serving as a director of a public corporation for five years as part of the settlement reached last month with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which said he and five other Xerox executives allowed the company to overstate its profits by $1.4 billion over four years.

KPMG, one of the nation's top accounting firms, was censured yesterday by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which accused the firm of helping executives at Xerox Corp. to manipulate and distort the company's financial statements from 1997 through 2000 by issuing audits stating that Xerox's reports were consistent with accounting rules when they were not. KPMG, which settled the case with regulators, also agreed to make extensive changes in its business practices to prevent securities-law violations.

The head of the Prince George's County schools had a well-documented record of questionable relations with education vendors when he was a superintendent in New York state, foreshadowing the problems that have made him the focus of a county ethics investigation. Prince George's school board members say they were at least partly aware of the accusations leveled against Chief Executive Officer Andre J. Hornsby in connection with his two-year tenure in Yonkers, N.Y. But they dismissed them as insignificant in deciding to hire him in the spring of last year.