SEC Formally Investigates IBM

glhturbo writes "IBM announced Thursday that it had received notice of a formal, nonpublic investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) concerning the company's disclosures relating to Q1 2005 earnings and expensing of equity compensation. According to the article, there has been a non-formal investigation going on since June 2005. Both articles indicate that it doesn't mean IBM has broken any laws, so we'll see what comes of it."

Comments

Re:It's about politics

[NutscrapeSucks]

You sound a lot like those right-wing looneys that blamed Enron's collapse on "overzealous regulation".

Hey, you want to invest your money into companies that are cooking their books, go right ahead. It's a free market.

Welcome to the world of business

[SmallFurryCreature]

ALL succesfull IT companies do this. Companies that don't do this do not succeed.

Some tricks.

• Agree on a project on a per hour basis: Cool because now the hired company has absolutly no motivation to finish quickly.
• Agree on a fixed price for a project: Cool because as soon as the project goes out of control you take all the good people of it and replace them with the cheapest staff you got preferably people who need the work experience.
• Make a detailed requirement list: Cool because the smallest change now becomes a new item to be negiotated.
• Draw up a broad general requirement: Cool because now you can't actually demand X is implemented since you never had it on paper.
• Demand all project work is done internally to assure you have control and supervision: Cool, any problems or delays caused by your staff will be used to explain ALL the problems and delays.
• Outsource the entire project and only accept the finished product: Cool, you will have absolutly no idea what the fuck is going on and the only thing you will ever see is faked demos until finally you get a few pieces that are A the product B the installation documentation C the techinal docs. None of wich are related and your own people ain't got a clue how to deal with it.
• Outsource production, do internal quality control and hire a 3rd party for extra work like porting: Even cooler, nobody will accept responsibility for anything and all will demand increased budgets to make up for the others failing.
• Buy an off the shelve solution: Cool, it won't ever work as you expected and the costs of workarounds will be 10x higer then if you had it custom build.
• Have it developed completly internally by people loyal to your own company: Cool, you now have programmers running loose in the building. Rentokill charges extra for that.
• Don't do IT. Do it the way you have done if for decades and make a fat profit: Cool, shareholders will dump your stock since companies that make a profit without buzzwords are just not the way you do business.

IT is the weirdest industry around.