In a regulatory filing accompanying the company’s fiscal fourth quarter earnings report, the firm said: HP has been informed that the Securities and Exchange Commission has issued a formal order of investigation in its inquiry.
While it was known that the SEC had requested information from HP at least two months ago, the company had not disclosed the escalation into a formal probe until yesterday.
Yet with five HP employees, including its former chairperson, already in court pleading not guilty to felony identity theft charges, such an investigation was perhaps inevitable.
The company has been under the spotlight since this summer, when it emerged that it had hired private detectives to hunt down the source of board-level leaks to the media, as part of an internal investigation known by the codename Kona.
Kona eventually saw third-party investigators pretend to be HP directors and journalists in order to view confidential telephone records, a practice known as pretexting. Individuals were also physically followed, and dumpster diving was employed.
Since the SEC generally doesn’t talk about these kinds of things, it is not yet known whether the investigation relates directly to the pretexting, or its aftermath, which saw whistleblower Tom Perkins quit the HP board of directors, though the latter is more likely.
Perkins, who was not the leaker, broke the pretexting story to Newsweek magazine in September, saying he believed HP did not fulfill its regulatory duty to inform its shareholders the real reason why he quit.
He resigned in May as a direct result, he says, of discovering he had been one of the pretexting victims, but HP did not disclose that fact to the SEC until several days after the Newsweek story broke four months later.
HP noted in a May filing that Perkins had resigned, but did not give a reason why. After Perkins’ September revelations, the company made another filing spelling out its version of events.
The company said at that time that it believed its disclosures in May were accurate and complete at the time of filing and were based upon Mr Perkins’ actions and representations prior to such time concerning the reasons for his resignation.
