A couple of weeks ago, I noted that, if Amtrak were a publicly traded company, it would have been guilty of securities fraud for misrepresenting its 2019 financial results in a press release before those results were officially published. Now Amtrak has published an unaudited edition of its 2019 returns and it verifies everything I said.
The document is the company’s monthly performance report for September, 2019, which also reports on year-to-date results. Since September 30 is the end of Amtrak’s fiscal year, this is in effect a preliminary annual report.
Page 3 of the report notes that Amtrak collected $2,288.5 million in ticket revenues, $143.9 million in food and beverage revenues, and $234.2 million in subsidies from the states. All of these are counted as “passenger related revenue.” Of course, subsidies from the states are not really passenger revenues, but they were portrayed that way in the press release. Continue reading
