Hewlett-Packard said that it had taken an $8.8 billion accounting charge after discovering what it said were “serious accounting improprieties” and “outright misrepresentations” at Autonomy, a British software maker that it bought for $10 billion last year.
H.P. has referred the matter to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Serious Fraud Office of Britain. The computer giant is the latest in a string of companies linked to cases of accounting problems.
| THE COMPANIES | THE FRAUD |
|---|---|
| American International Group | The American International Group, once the nation’s largest insurance group before it nearly collapsed in the 2008 financial crisis, agreed in 2010 to pay $725 million to three Ohio pension funds to settle six-year-old claims of accounting fraud, stock manipulation and bid-rigging. Taken together with earlier settlements, A.I.G. will ladle out more than $1 billion to Ohio investors. The state’s attorney general, Richard Cordray, later became director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. |
| Enron | The company’s sudden collapse at the end of 2001 left Enron, with its crooked E logo, the premier public symbol of corporate ignominy. Investors and employees lost billions when the shares became worthless. Kenneth L. Lay and Jeffrey K. Skilling, the chief executives, were found guilty in 2006 of fraud and conspiracy. Mr. Lay died while awaiting sentencing. Mr. Skilling was sentenced to 24 years in prison. |
| Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac | The two big government-sponsored mortgage finance companies each had multibillion-dollar accounting scandals in the late 1990s and early 2000s, leading to a $400 million civil fine for Fannie Mae and a $125 million fine for Freddie Mac. |
| HealthSouth | For seven years, the national hospital chain filed false financial statements that inflated its performance by a total of at least $2.7 billion. Richard M. Scrushy, the company’s former chief executive, was acquitted on criminal charges but in a civil trial, he was found responsible for the fraud and was ordered to pay $2.9 billion to the company’s shareholders. |
| MicroStrategy | Michael J. Saylor, the company’s chairman, and two other officials were accused by the S.E.C. in 2000 of reporting profits when the company was actually losing money. Mr. Saylor agreed to pay $350,000 in penalties and $8.3 million to shareholders. The other two officials each agreed to pay $350,000 in penalties and to pay a total of $1.7 million to shareholders. |
| Olympus | In one of Japan’s biggest corporate scandals, the camera and medical equipment maker and three of its former executives pleaded guilty in September over charges related to a $1.7 billion accounting cover-up. The scandal was exposed in 2011 by Olympus’s chief executive, Michael C. Woodford, who was fired by the company’s board after asking about deals that were later found to have been used to conceal the losses. |
| Satyam Computer Services | The software company was found in 2009 to have falsely reported more than $1 billion in profits, in a scheme that analysts and academics at the time labeled “India’s Enron.” The Indian affiliate of PricewaterhouseCoopers, PW India, failed to independently confirm the cash balances in bank accounts, and was fined $7.5 million by the S.E.C. |
| Tyco International | Two of Tyco’s executives, L. Dennis Kozlowski and Mark H. Swartz, were convicted in 2005 of stealing $180 million outright and improperly making about $430 million by manipulating the company’s stock value. The men became symbols of corporate excess, as they used the looted money to buy things like $17,000 umbrella stands and $2 million birthday parties. PricewaterhouseCoopers, the firm’s auditor, later agreed to pay $225 million to settle claims from investors. |
| Waste Management | North America’s largest waste hauler restated its earning by $1.5 billion in 1998, after having exaggerated its profits for years. The S.E.C. levied a $7 million fine on the company’s auditor, Arthur Andersen, which the agency said knew about the practice. |
| WorldCom | The company’s $11 billion fraud, which included pumping up revenue figures to meet growth targets, came to symbolize the telecommunications bubble of the 1990s. In 2005, Bernard J. Ebbers, a former chief executive, was found guilty of orchestrating the fraud and sentenced to 25 years in jail. |