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Its like a scene from Groundhog Day for Nortel. The Canadian telecom gear company says it will once again restate certain financial results. That’s the fourth time in four years that the company has had to restate corrected financial errors. Sheesh. The restatement is also the second one under the watch of the company’s newest CEO Mike Zafirovski, who took the job in late 2005 .

Zafirovski has been attempting to revive the company with a plan that includes a goal of 20 percent market share in all of its businesses in the next 3 to 5 years. I met him briefly several months after he took the CEO slot, and he was the quintessential determined turnaround CEO despite a breach of contract lawsuit from Motorola and later a restatement under his belt.

Wonder how he’s feeling today now that he’s got another accounting mistep on his hands. Bloomberg quotes him as saying, “Clearly I’m not pleased that we have to restate.” Morale has got to be pretty low already, with the recent announcement of 2,900 job cuts and the departure of the CFO.

To be fair, Zafirovski is cleaning up the mess made by his predecessors. And the restatement itself sounds minor enough. UBS Investment Research puts it plainly and says:

Nortel understated historical pension expense by ~$104M over several years.

The company explains it as:

“third party actuarial calculation errors embedded in Nortel’s North American pension and post-retirement plans and revenue incorrectly recognized in prior periods that should have been deferred to later periods.”

Whatever the reason behind the restatement, the company will have a hard time turning itself around while it shoots itself in the financial foot every so often.

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