Autonomy Chief Says Whitman Is Watering Down HP Fraud Claims

McGruber writes "Possibly the wierdest tax-writeoff of the year happened when Meg Whitman claimed that her US-based multinational corporation HP had been defrauded by British-software firm Autonomy; Ms. Whitman and HP claimed an 8.8 billion dollar write-down. As the Los Angeles Times explains, 'HP acquired Autonomy in 2011 for $11 billion, a move it hoped would turn it away from its dependence on sales of computer hardware with its low profit margins, and into the more profitable business of software. However, the price HP paid was widely criticized for being too high, and in part led to the subsequent ouster of Chief Executive Leo Apotheker.' The wierdness continues — in its annual report filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, HP claims that the U.S. Department of Justice has opened an investigation into HP's allegations that HP has uncovered widespread accounting fraud at Autonomy. However, The Guardian points out that former Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch claims that HP 'is watering down the accusations it had levelled against him over the accounts filed by his old software company.' Mr. Lynch also says that he has not been contacted by the U.S. Department of Justice, which HP claims is investigating the alleged fraud. Perhaps Slashdot's users can help make sense of this mess and help explain it to me?"

Comments

Re:Smoke and mirrors

[greg1104]

This is a useful overview, but it doesn't cover the details of the confusing part.

My take is that the whole DOJ angle is part of HP looking for a scapegoat to cover both their own mismanagement and lack of ability to due anything useful with Autonomy's IP. It's a fishing expedition to find one, but they have no hard evidence yet of who's to blame. Autonomy itself used aggressive accounting measures to inflate its sale price, as all companies being acquired will try to do. What HP really wants is to ignore the whole thing and write off the loss, since catching any accounting mess should have happened before the purchase. But they can't just do that due to class action lawsuits saying it's HP who is at fault. So they're going through the motions of prosecuting other people to shift the blame, but so far they don't have any hard evidence of that fraud. If they did, they'd be leading with that.

Here's how I sequenced all the events here to sort out what happened:

• August 22, 2012: earnings are terrible, and we're going to blame the Enterprise Services division.
• November 20, 2012: The scapegoat picked for the bad performance of Enterprise Services is the Autonomy aquisition. HP wants to write off a 8.8B loss right now for that. They can't admit "we fucked up", so they blame accounting issues at Autonomy.
• November 21, 2012: The U.S. Department of Justice is called in to help push blame toward Autonomy, along with the U.K. Serious Fraud Office (Autonomy was originally a British company) and the SEC.
• November 26, 2012: a class action lawsuit is filed by HP stockholders. That claims this is all bullshit, and HP itself is the source of fraud here. Similar class action lawsuits are filed against the accounting firms involved.
• December 28, 2012: Former Autonomy head Mike Lynch points out that HP hasn't actually given out any detailed accounting for where that 8.8B figure comes from. And the US Justice department hasn't actually gotten him involved in things yet.

It may be the case that HP's forensic accounting here finds something lawsuit worthy. It's telling that so far, all they've done is contact the DOJ. If they had a smoking gun, they'd have sued the responsible partly directly instead. That's why I suspect this is just fishing without solid evidence so far.