Carillion's Fall: Accounting for Construction Projects*
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT This case describes the circumstances surrounding the fall of Carillion plc, a large UK construction company. Carillion issued a series of write‐downs that hurt investor confidence and led to debt covenant violations. Students assume the role of a fictional investor, Holly Chapman, who has lost money investing in Carillion. Chapman is seeking to understand what went wrong with the company that led to its demise. To do so, she needs to analyze the company's risky contracts, governance structure, auditors, and accounting choices. The case allows students to explore a rich and complex scenario of business failure. It is set in the United Kingdom, but Carillion reports under IFRS and faces business and governance challenges that translate easily to the Canadian context and elsewhere. The case is best suited to MBA, Executive MBA, and upper‐year undergraduate classes in accounting or governance. It provides an opportunity to explore (1) risk management, (2) governance, auditor, and regulator failures, and (3) accounting for construction projects, goodwill impairment, early payment facilities, and pensions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".