Can "earlier this year" be used in the present perfect?

Is "earlier this year" a specific time reference?
i.e. Can you say (A) is definitely wrong and (B) is right?

(A) Earlier this year, ABC, Inc., has conducted a survey.
(B) Earlier this year, ABC, Inc., conducted a survey.

It appears that you have been taught a ‘rule’ governing time reference with the present perfect something like this, from www.englishpage.com:

You CANNOT use the Present Perfect with specific time expressions such as: yesterday, one year ago, last week, when I was a child, when I lived in Japan, at that moment, that day, one day, etc. We CAN use the Present Perfect with unspecific expressions such as: ever, never, once, many times, several times, before, so far, already, yet, etc. [emphasis mine]

This is imprecise. The ‘rule’ actually observed in formal practice is that you cannot locate the present perfect within a timespan which does not include the present. This is only indirectly a matter of specificity: locating an event at a specific point or timespan in the past such as yesterday or when I was a child excludes the present. But equally ‘specific’ time references which include the present, such as today or this year are perfectly acceptable:

^okI have answered three questions today.

This rule arises because the present perfect, although it mentions a past eventuality, expresses a current state or situation which in some sense derives from that past eventuality: its ‘tense’, the time it is talking about, is present.

Consequently, earlier this year should not be used with a present perfect; but this year would be just fine:

^∗ Earlier this year, ABC, Inc., has conducted a survey.
^okThis year ABC, Inc., has conducted a survey.

ADDED:
F.E. points out that CGEL (5.3.3, 144-5) accepts an exclusive-past reference under “restrictive conditions”; for instance:

ii. b. We’ve already discussed this yesterday.

CGEL remarks that “the already indicates that I’m concerned with the occurrence of the situation of our discussing it within a time-span up to now and cancels the normally excluding effect of yesterday evident in [iib].” That’s plausible, but I think it is grasping at straws; I, for one, would not find this acceptable in formal use unless it were marked, by a comma, as an afterthought, a supplement. In colloquial use, to be sure, this use is not unusual, and it may indeed become formally acceptable in another generation.

• SUPERADDED in response to F.E.’s request for “info related to today's standard English”
  _{Source: Hundt, Marianne and Smith, Nicholas “The present perfect in British and American English: Has there been any change, recently?”, ICAME Journal, 33, 45-63.}

  3.2 PPs with past tense adverbials
  As pointed out in the introduction, the PP is increasingly used with adverbials that clearly refer to an event in the past. Occasional instances are also found in our corpora of written English, but they are so rare that a more detailed frequency breakdown would be inappropriate [my emphasis - sb] [...] Co-occurrences of the PP and adverbials that require the SP according to the usage guides are more commonly found in spoken English [...]

  4 Conclusion
  [...] PPs with past tense adverbials are still rare and usually ‘locally’ triggered. As our conclusion on this point, we could use Kjellmer’s comment (2003: 18) on the use of perfect constructions without auxiliary have:

  So some of what we are at first likely to regard as simple solecisms in modern English may still be solecisms, but in that case solecisms with both a respectable ancestry and some distinguished neighbours and relatives. Whether they will reassert themselves as legitimate in the language, unlikely as it seems, remains to be seen.

CGEL’s other example is quite different, and in fact bears out the rule:

He has got up at five o’clock.

Here the time reference is not to an exclusively past occasion but to a recurrent situation in the course of a timeframe which includes the present. At five o'clock “is a crucial part of the potentially recurrent situation: the issue is that of his getting up at this early hour; there is no reference to any specific occasion, as there is in the simple preterite,” He got up at five o’clock.

_{NOTE: I've CW'd this answer because (apart from the additions) it is quoted almost verbatim from an earlier answer to a similar (but not identical) question.}

When you specify the period during which an event occurred, you cannot also use the present perfect tense:

*Earlier this year, ABC, Inc. has conducted a survey.
*Yesterday, ABC, Inc. has conducted a survey.
*Last week, ABC, Inc. has conducted a survey.

Instead, if you are simply stating that a discrete event X has occurred, you must use the simple past:

Earlier this year, ABC, Inc. conducted a survey.
Yesterday, ABC, Inc. conducted a survey.
Last week, ABC, Inc. conducted a survey.

However, if you use certain adverbs that locate the event at a relative point in time, the restriction no longer applies:

ABC, Inc. has just conducted a survey.
ABC, Inc. has already conducted a survey.