Reporting that one of its many problems had been the recent extended sales slump in the women’s apparel, the seven store retailer said it would start a three month liquidation sale in all of the stores.

a) its many problems had been the recent

b) its many problems has been the recently

c) its many problems is the recently

d) their many problems is the recent

e) their many problems had been the recent

When I looked this problem, I thought this is a present perfect tense and inclined to pick B. The reasoning I came up in limited time was:
A recent sales slump started some time in past and extended to the current time. This seems to be present perfect.

I know there is one more issue of recently in option b) with the use of recently, however, I would like comments from instructors about my approach to recognize verb tense. Is there anyway to make sure whether a present perfect is needed.

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The perfect tenses, though used infrequently on the GMAT, often induce this type of confusion. Remember, the present perfect is used when an event began at some time in the past and continues to the present moment, while the past perfect indicates a completed past event that happened before a second completed past event. In the cited example, the verb "said" in the non-underlined section of the sentence is a past tense verb. In order to indicate that the sales slump occurred prior to this past announcement, the past perfect tense is necessary.

A second approach would have been to focus on the recent/recently split. It is nonsensical that a retailer would INTENTIONALLY extend a sales slump. However, this is exactly what is suggested by the adverb "recently," which modifies the adjective "extended." The sentence should instead include the adjective "recent," which correctly describes the slump. Thus, answer choices B and C are eliminated. From there, the its/their pronoun split is relatively straightforward. Since the subject of the sentence is the singular "retailer," the singular pronoun "its" is correct.

The credited response is A.

-dan