UK Serious Fraud Office Probes Autonomy With ... Autonomy!
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judgecorp writes "The British Serious Fraud Office (SFO) is investigating whether British software firm Autonomy fiddled its accounts to inflate the price which HP paid for it to a whopping $10 billion. There's a problem though. Autonomy's Introspect software is used to trawl large data sets for information and is in use at the SFO for jobs such as this fraud investigation. It's not just ironic: the SFO says its £4.6 million contract with Autonomy could create a conflict of interest and it may have to pull out of the investigation."
Not sure if it's a conflict (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This is just a test of real requirements (Score:3, Interesting)
UK Govt is now manned by a bunch of corporate whores (even more so than the last bunch) who just want to ensure that the software they're using to discover fraud can be "friendly" to those who are "on the inside".
Last thing a corrupt government wants is any real transparency. The best is some form of translucency, like a shower door or rose-tinted glasses - so what you think you see hides what is really happening.
ok, [/rant]
I didn't RTFA, but I at least read the headlines... which stated that they raised a conflict of interest flag precisely because of the potential for what you said. I just wish more government offices would be this transparent. I also hope the SFO hands this over to some other competent group rather than just dropping it because the company could fiddle with the results of their own investigation.
Personally, I'd still like to see Autonomy's analysis of their own books -- if they find themselves guilty, it'll be hard for the company in the short term, but extremely good advertising for them in the longer term (yes, we're good enough that we can even catch our own finance and marketing departments' shenanigans and not mess with the data!)