Serious Fraud Office Drop Investigation Into Autonomy Accounting

Posted by Soulskill on Monday January 19, 2015 @04:18PM from the government-agencies-with-funny-names dept.

mrspoonsi sends up an update on the investigation into Autonomy, a software company acquired by HP in 2011. HP paid a staggering $11.7 billion in the deal, then later wrote off $8.8 billion and claimed Autonomy's management intentionally defrauded them. The UK Serious Fraud Office opened a case on the matter in 2013, but that investigation has now been dropped. According to the Office's press release, they felt there was "insufficient evidence for a realistic prospect of conviction," given the information they had to work with. Autonomy is not off the hook, however — the case has now been entirely ceded to U.S. authorities.

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Re:confusing headline. by Anonymous Coward · 2015-01-19 19:15 · Score: 5, Interesting

Yes, the originators of the language have clearly got it wrong.
The funny collective-noun-plural-verb thing is an innovation by the Brits. In England, the language continued to develop during the 1800s and even 1900s, while it remained more or less fixed in the US (partly under the influence of Noah Webster) subsequent to independence. Thus Shakespeare writes "The army is discharged all and gone" in Henry IV, not "The army are discharged all and gone."