You are given a text that consists of multiple sentences. Your task is to perform abstractive summarization on this text. Use your understanding of the content to express the main ideas and crucial details in a shorter, coherent, and natural sounding text. 
Text: I'm pleased to report that we experienced a very successful year, both financially and operationally, especially with our revenue and earnings per share growth.
As we begin 2022, we believe that Rollins is poised to deliver on our short-term and long-term objectives.
We look forward to sharing our progress with you as the new year unfolds.
As we previously disclosed, the company is in discussion with the staff at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to resolve our SEC investigation.
During the fourth quarter, we increased the accrual related to this matter to $8 million for a potential settlement.
Given that the investigation is ongoing and out of respect for the process, we cannot answer any questions during our Q&A, but we are focused on resolving this inquiry in the very near future.
As Gary mentioned, we are extremely pleased with our 2021 performance and very proud of the hard-working men and women of our company that propelled us to achieve record levels of revenue growth across each of our brands.
I'm also pleased to note that we again realized a very strong performance in our termite service line, posting year-over-year double-digit growth of 14.3%.
While our termite business has been growing by double digits for several years in a row now, termite damage claims, as well as any related to litigation have declined year by year reaching our lowest level in recent history during 2021.
To be more specific, termite damage claims received have declined from a high of 9,349 to the low of 380 new claims received this past year while, at the same time, revenue from termite has tripled.
The genesis of this great story started with a serious commitment to address a problem that had been building for several years.
Obviously, resolve alone wouldn't clean up a problem that large.
Success came from a series of changes initiated by our leadership team to our culture, our training, our treatment protocols, and our quality assurance processes.
We significantly improved and expanded training of our field service and sales team members, and our managers made that training mandatory before you could be allowed to service our customers.
We held hundreds of regional training meetings and a multitude of termite-specific training modules were developed.
We revised our treatment protocols to solve situations we were experiencing, due in part to evolving new construction practices in various markets.
These revised treatment protocols, in many cases, exceeded state treating requirements.
Additionally, we created a nationwide quality assurance team that took control of the claims process, requiring our branch offices to report each claim immediately.
This ensured a quick response to our customers when most needed.
This QA group also went to the field and inspected our team's work and verified that things were being done according to our new treating requirements.
Finally, and maybe most important, the most difficult change was to our culture.
As an example, any location failing quality assurance team inspections had to make a trip to the Division President of the company.
Those that failed to adjust and adhere to the new practices by the time a follow-up QA visit occurred didn't receive a return trip.
Change came quickly due to those practices.
Fast forward to today and all our newly acquired companies are brought under these standards as quickly as possible.
We believe these service level commitments are important to meet our -- or exceed the expectations our customers have for us.
Operationally, our service offering is led by a very strong and dedicated termite services group and a very experienced technical service team.
I'm proud to work for a company that has made these commitments to protect our customers, our brands, and our reputation.
2021 was a strong and productive year for Rollins' family of pest control brands.
Q4 revenues increased 11.9% to $600.3 million, compared to $536.3 million the previous year.
Net income rose to $65.3 million or $0.13 per diluted share, compared to $62.6 million or $0.13 per diluted share for the same period in 2020.
Our revenues for the full year were $2.424 billion, an increase of 12%, compared to $2.161 billion for the same period last year.
Net income for the full year increased 34.5% to $350.7 million or $0.71 per diluted share, compared to $260.8 million or $0.53 per diluted share for the comparable period last year.
Again, Julie will review our full-year GAAP and non-GAAP results shortly.
All our business lines experienced solid growth, with residential pest control up 11.9% and termite realizing growth of 13.6%.
Additionally, commercial pest control delivered an impressive 11.4% growth over the fourth quarter of last year.
Julie will give you a more detailed breakdown on organic revenue growth by service line in a few moments.
Before I move on from revenue and address expenses, I want to emphasize how proud we are of the growth rates we achieved in the fourth quarter and for the year.
During the year, coincidentally, Orkin reached their 120th anniversary and celebrated by putting up one of their best performances in years.
All our brands grew and contributed greatly to our operating results.
On the expense side, payroll, materials and supplies, and fleet are our three largest expense areas, and I'll give you some additional color on how each of these items impacted margin in Q4.
Let's start with labor.
Remarkably, we've been able to achieve above-average revenue growth rates, while keeping our service payroll expense margins below last year in Q4.
On a year-to-date basis, that expense margin is flat to 2020.
Our administrative payroll margins also improved over 2020 as we continue to improve productivity.
However, we did experience a slight increase in our sales payroll margin.
The sales payroll expense trend is reflective of the planned investment we made in up-staffing our residential and commercial sales teams over the last 12 months.
This investment yielded the high levels of growth I mentioned a few minutes ago.
If there's an area I do not mind giving up margin to, its sales payroll so long as we are growing revenue faster than the sales payroll expense.
I'm proud of our team's ability to manage payroll expense despite recruiting challenges caused by labor shortages.
Last week, we held our virtual Rollins leadership meeting with over 175 of our top leaders.
Most of our topics were about best practices in recruiting and retaining our people.
This is a huge focus item for us in 2022.
Let's move to materials and supplies costs or M&S.
Our M&S costs were a slight headwind in the quarter, particularly for our termite and ancillary service offerings, where we've had more supply chain issues in the latter part of the year.
Our procurement team is working hard in this area by seeking alternate products, while our operations team has analyzed the impact of these increases and adjusting our rate card pricing upward where needed to counteract the rise in material costs.
Probably most impactful to us in Q4 is fleet expense, particularly fuel.
Compared to Q4 of 2020, our fuel costs were up 56.5% in Q4 of 2021.
That equated to over $4.5 million in increased fuel costs for the quarter.
In addition, increases in fleet repair costs for items like tires and basic maintenance also rose double digits.
As we've discussed in the past, we're making significant progress with our BOSS operating systems' routing and scheduling technologies, which help us mitigate some of these fuel cost increases.
Since reducing miles driven between services saves not only fuel but also time, this technology contributed in an even bigger way to helping us manage our service payroll expense by enabling us to reach our customers in a more efficient and productive manner.
We began to feel the first significant impacts of the fuel increases in Q2 of 2021.
So, we anticipate that fleet costs will continue to be a significant headwind for us in the first quarter of this year.
Related to expenses, there's one other item I'd like to mention.
Most are familiar with the cybersecurity attacks experienced by SolarWinds and Colonial Pipeline and others that recently put a spotlight on cybersecurity threats.
Due to concerns about these types of cybersecurity issues, in Q4, we fast-tracked our multiyear strategy to enhance our protection against cybersecurity threats by accelerating a $3 million expenditure.
We have a dedicated cyber team implementing enhanced cybersecurity controls for our domestic and international operations to protect our employees, our customers, and our brands.
Shifting briefly to the acquisition landscape, we continue to successfully execute our acquisition strategy of identifying and acquiring high-quality companies with shared culture and values.
Last year ended strong with over 70% of our trailing 12 months revenue acquired occurring in the fourth quarter.
And looking ahead, we expect that strategic acquisitions will continue to be an important component in our initiatives to further grow our business.
We delivered an outstanding fourth quarter, highlighted by significant growth across many key financial metrics.
As we previously discussed in our third-quarter conference call, we assess the performance metrics we report to ensure they best articulate Rollins' business.
To that end, we discussed several additional measurements we would present each quarter, including EBITDA, free cash flow, and total organic revenue growth.
In addition, we're now including organic revenue growth by revenue type, specifically residential, commercial, and termite.
We believe this will bring further transparency to our revenue growth measurements.
We realize we are going over a lot of information today and believe this will give you a resource to review everything that we have covered.
So, now on to the numbers.
Our fourth-quarter revenues of $600 million was an increase of 11.9% actual exchange rate growth, 8.9% organic.
For the constant exchange rate, the total revenue growth percentages calculated to 11% with an 8.1% organic.
For the full year 2021, revenues of $2.4 billion was an increase of 12.2% over full year 2020, 9.5% organic.
The constant exchange rate, total revenue growth for 2021 equaled 11.4%, 8.7% organic.
As mentioned previously, residential, commercial, and termite all grew double digits this quarter over the same quarter last year.
What Jerry did not tell you was that all three also grew double digits for the full year 2021 over 2020.
For the fourth quarter growth over last year, residential grew 11.9%, 8.4% organic; commercial grew 11.4%, 9.3% organic; lastly, we have termite, which grew 13.6% with 10.1% organic.
For the full year 2021 over 2020, residential grew 12.9%, 10% organic; commercial grew 10.2%, 7.4% organic; and we closed out with termite at a 14.3% growth, 11.9% organic.
Now, to our income.
For the fourth quarter and year to date, we are presenting adjusted EBITDA for comparison purposes due to the one-time super vesting of our late chairman stock grants in the third quarter of 2020, the impact of our gain on sale of several of our Clark properties in the first six months of 2021 and our recorded accruals related to the potential settlement of the SEC matter in the third and fourth quarters of 2021.
Fourth-quarter adjusted 2021 EBITDA was $122.2 million or 11.2% over 2020.
Fourth quarter 2021 adjusted earnings per share was $0.14 per diluted share or 7.7% improvement over 2020.
For the full year 2021, our adjusted EBITDA was $546.4 million or 20.1% over last year.
Year to date, 2021 adjusted earnings per share was $0.68 per diluted share or 25.9% over 2020.
For fourth quarter 2021, gross margin increased 50.4% or 0.10 point over last year.
That was after overcoming our strong headwinds of fleet expenses, specifically fuel in the amount of $4.5 million and termite M&F for $2.7 million.
Sales, general and administrative fourth quarter 2021 margin increased 1.6% over last year.
This was driven by the increase in sales salaries mentioned by Jerry along with the increased SEC accrual.
Without these two items, our SG&A fourth-quarter margin presented an improvement over fourth quarter 2020.
Related to the SEC potential settlement, we recorded an accrual of $5 million in Q4.
This was in addition to the $3 million we previously accrued in the third quarter.
These amounts are not tax-deductible for state or federal taxes.
The company continues to cooperate with the SEC and working toward a final resolution.
During the year, we completed significant remediation efforts, including the addition of a Chief Accounting Officer, SEC Attorney, and SEC External Reporting Director.
Also, we reevaluated and strengthened our internal controls over financial reporting, while improving processes, procedures, and related supporting documentation, including those related to management's judgments and estimates.
Now, for a few notes regarding our cash flow.
Our dividends full year 2021 were $208.7 million or an increase of 30% over 2020, while cash used for acquisitions declined 5.8% to $139 million for 2021.
We ended the current period with $105.3 million in cash, of which $78.1 million was held by our foreign subsidiaries.
As you've probably noted over time, our foreign cash held has increased with the exception of use for acquisitions.
We are in the process of restructuring our foreign entities to make cash from foreign operations more readily available.
This should be completed later in 2022.
Now, to free cash flow.
For the fourth quarter of 2021, our free cash flow was $88.9 million, or a decrease of 0.8% over last year.
The decline was due to a capital expenditure increase from upgrading our data center facility as part of our cybersecurity initiatives.
Full-year free cash flow was $395 million or a decrease of $41 million.
This decline was primarily due to the $30 million 2020 carry back taxes paid in 2021 and a $32 million gain from the sale of the Clark properties, the latter of which is an operating cash reconciling item.
Last, I'm happy to share that yesterday our board of directors approved a regular cash dividend of $0.10 per share that will be paid on March 10, 2022, to shareholders of record at the close of business, February 10, 2022.
This represents a 25% increase over the March 2021 regular cash dividend paid out.
The dividend increase reflects our strong performance in 2021 and that accentuates our financial strength, our solid capital position, and the board's confidence in our outlook for continued growth.

user
compname says q4 revenue rose 11.9% to $600.3 mln.
q4 revenue rose 11.9 percent to $600.3 million.
q4 adjusted earnings per share $0.14.
q4 earnings per share $0.13.

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