Autonomy founder Mike Lynch is still not backing down in his ongoing battle with Hewlett-Packard.

“Simply put, these allegations are false, and in the absence of further detail we cannot understand what HP believes to be the basis for them,” he said in a statement, as well as aiming at $5 billion in writedowns the company has taken related to the controversial deal. “We continue to reject these allegations in the strongest possible terms.”

Lynch’s latest volley was prompted by a regulatory filing HP made earlier today, noting that the U.S. Department of Justice was indeed investigating its acquisition of British software company, for which it is trying to write down about $5 billion in expenses due to alleged “serious accounting improprieties.”

HP had taken the case to U.S. federal authorities in the first place, but now it’s official.

This caused Lynch, who has been vociferously battling the Silicon Valley tech giant over the allegations and rejecting HP’s claims of fraud in the $12 billion acquisition, to respond again.

In his statement, he presented a laundry list of arguments about how HP is trying to fool investors by pointing the finger at him.

Here’s his whole thing, so you can read for yourself:

It is extremely disappointing that HP has again failed to provide a detailed calculation of its $5 billion write-down of Autonomy, or publish any explanation of the serious allegations it has made against the former management team, in its annual report filing today.

Furthermore, it is now less clear how much of the $5 billion write-down is in fact being attributed to the alleged accounting issues, and how much to other changes in business performance and earnings projections. This appears to be a material change in HP’s allegations.

Simply put, these allegations are false, and in the absence of further detail we cannot understand what HP believes to be the basis for them.

We also do not understand why HP is raising these issues now given that Autonomy reported into the HP Finance team from the day the acquisition completed in October 2011, there was an extensive due diligence process and Autonomy was audited as a public company for many years.

We would particularly make the following points:

* HP’s CFO Cathie Lesjak and her team, plus a number of outside advisors, had access to all Autonomy accounts and documents from October 2011 onwards, and raised no issues.

* Beginning in November 2011, HP and KPMG reviewed Autonomy’s closing balance sheet in detail, and Ernst & Young reviewed Deloitte’s audit work papers.

* Beginning in October 2011, HP studied in detail Autonomy’s tax structure and transfer pricing as well as its revenue recognition practices (led by Paul Curtis, HP’s worldwide head of revenue recognition).

* An independent, third-party valuation of Autonomy’s assets was carried out in January 2012.

* Quarterly business reviews were held with Autonomy management, Meg Whitman and Cathie Lesjak to discuss Autonomy’s financial performance.

* HP has continued to sell and account for hardware alongside Autonomy software in the same way that Autonomy did for the year since the acquisition completed.

* Regarding differences between IFRS and US GAAP accounting standards, which appear to have a role in some of the allegations HP has made, Autonomy’s accounting policies were made clear in Autonomy’s 2010 annual report.

We also note the statement in HP’s annual report that it received confirmation from the US Department of Justice on 21 November 2012 (the day after HP’s first public statement), that the Department had opened an investigation. We can confirm that we have as yet had no contact from any regulatory authority. We will co-operate with any investigation and look forward to the opportunity to explain our position.

We continue to reject these allegations in the strongest possible terms. Autonomy’s financial accounts were properly maintained in accordance with applicable regulations, fully audited by Deloitte, and available to HP during the due diligence process.

We remain deeply concerned about how this process has been conducted, and believe it is in everyone’s interest for it to be resolved as soon as possible.

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• More From Mike Lynch: HP’s Autonomy Accusations Are Getting Weaker
• Mike Lynch Punches Back at Today’s HP Filing: Whither $5B Writedown?
• HP Confirms DOJ Is Investigating Alleged Fraud in Autonomy Deal
• Yes, There Are Layoffs Pending at HP’s Autonomy Unit in the U.K.
• Former HP CEO Shifts Blame for Autonomy Deal to Chairman
• Dell Passed on Autonomy Before HP Bought It
• Why Mike Lynch Is Playing PR Hardball With HP
• Autonomy Founder Lynch Asks Board to Explain HP Allegations
• Autonomy Founder Lynch Blames Accounting Standards in HP Flap
• The Red Flags That Were Obvious — To Some — In the HP-Autonomy Deal
• Oracle’s Ellison Vindicated in Autonomy PR Flap by HP’s $8.8 Billion Writedown
• Autonomy Founder Mike Lynch Rejects HP Charges, Alleges Mismanagement
• What Exactly Happened at Autonomy?
• HP Explains Its $8.8 Billion “Oops”
• HP Beats Street Amid Sales Declines, Takes $8.8 Billion Charge
• HP Names Microsoft Exec Robert Youngjohns to Run Autonomy
• Search Under Way at HP for Autonomy’s Next Chief
• Autonomy’s Mike Lynch Talks About Being HP’s Speedy Tiger Cub (Video)
• Britain’s First Software Billionaire Now Reports to HP CEO Meg Whitman
• Oracle Launches Exalytics Machine, Probably Ending Spat With Autonomy
• Autonomy: When All Else Fails, Blame the Bankers
• Mike Lynch to Oracle: Oh, You Mean Those Slides
• Oracle: You Have a Very Bad Memory, Mr. Lynch
• HP Reportedly Close to $10 Billion Buyout of Autonomy, PC Unit Spinoff
• Will Oracle and Microsoft Bid on Autonomy?

That newspaper reported today, in a thinly sourced story, that as many as 200 people were due to lose their jobs at the British software subsidiary in a shake-up expected soon.

Sources familiar with the company’s plans tell AllThingsD that the number of jobs expected to be cut is actually fewer than 70; the cuts will focus on sales personnel, all of whom were originally hired prior to HP’s acquisition of the company. Additionally, the job cuts were put in motion in September, well before HP made public its intention to write down the value of Autonomy by about $5 billion. Layoffs in European countries, like those in the U.K., are more complicated to carry out, and so take months to complete.

In explaining the writedown, HP, which paid north of $11 billion for Autonomy in 2011, alleged that the British company’s executives essentially cooked the books in order to make Autonomy appear more valuable than it was. It has reported its findings to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.K.’s Serious Fraud Office.

Mike Lynch, the founder and former CEO of Autonomy, has rejected HP’s allegations, and accused it of mismanaging the company after the acquisition closed.

RELATED POSTS:

• More From Mike Lynch: HP’s Autonomy Accusations Are Getting Weaker
• Mike Lynch Punches Back at Today’s HP Filing: Whither $5B Writedown?
• HP Confirms DOJ Is Investigating Alleged Fraud in Autonomy Deal
• Yes, There Are Layoffs Pending at HP’s Autonomy Unit in the U.K.
• Former HP CEO Shifts Blame for Autonomy Deal to Chairman
• Dell Passed on Autonomy Before HP Bought It
• Why Mike Lynch Is Playing PR Hardball With HP
• Autonomy Founder Lynch Asks Board to Explain HP Allegations
• Autonomy Founder Lynch Blames Accounting Standards in HP Flap
• The Red Flags That Were Obvious — To Some — In the HP-Autonomy Deal
• Oracle’s Ellison Vindicated in Autonomy PR Flap by HP’s $8.8 Billion Writedown
• Autonomy Founder Mike Lynch Rejects HP Charges, Alleges Mismanagement
• What Exactly Happened at Autonomy?
• HP Explains Its $8.8 Billion “Oops”
• HP Beats Street Amid Sales Declines, Takes $8.8 Billion Charge
• HP Names Microsoft Exec Robert Youngjohns to Run Autonomy
• Search Under Way at HP for Autonomy’s Next Chief
• Autonomy’s Mike Lynch Talks About Being HP’s Speedy Tiger Cub (Video)
• Britain’s First Software Billionaire Now Reports to HP CEO Meg Whitman
• Oracle Launches Exalytics Machine, Probably Ending Spat With Autonomy
• Autonomy: When All Else Fails, Blame the Bankers
• Mike Lynch to Oracle: Oh, You Mean Those Slides
• Oracle: You Have a Very Bad Memory, Mr. Lynch
• HP Reportedly Close to $10 Billion Buyout of Autonomy, PC Unit Spinoff
• Will Oracle and Microsoft Bid on Autonomy?

Today, for some reason, he decided to reach out to Bloomberg News with an emailed statement. The point? Apparently to remind the world that he wasn’t the only one making decisions at the time regarding the deal that ultimately cost him his job.

According to the Bloomberg report, Apotheker says that “no single CEO is ever able to make a decision on a major acquisition in isolation, particularly at a company as large as HP — and certainly not without the full support of the chairman of the board.” He then turns his guns on Chairman Ray Lane, without mentioning him by name: “The HP board, led by its chairman, met many times to review the acquisition and unanimously supported the deal, as well as the underlying strategic objective to bolster HP’s market presence in enterprise data.”

Indeed, he has a point. It’s also worth remembering that the board at the time included HP’s current CEO, Meg Whitman, who took over the job in the wake of Apotheker’s ouster less than a month after the Autonomy deal was announced.

There was more to call Apotheker’s competence into question that day — Aug. 18, 2011 — that contributed toward his stint as CEO being cut short. HP fell short on earnings, and he also launched the ill-fated effort to spin off the PC unit as a separate company, and killed the Palm handheld and tablet unit acquired only a year earlier by his predecessor Mark Hurd.

Clearly, Apotheker doesn’t like getting all the blame for the deal. Lane was certainly at the table, and lent his support for it. And, for that matter, so was Whitman.

Consider yourself reminded.

Kara Swisher reported yesterday that several Groupon board members have been considering replacing Mason with a new CEO.

Today, in an appearance at Business Insider’s Ignition conference, Mason admitted to the audience that his performance was under review.

“The stock is down 80 percent since the IPO a year ago, so it would be weird if they weren’t discussing if I was the right guy,” he said. “That’s their chief responsibility, and they have discussed it in the past.”

At a regularly scheduled meeting tomorrow, the company’s directors, who do have that fiduciary responsibility to Groupon’s shareholders, will be asking the tough question as to whether Mason should continue running the daily deals company, or if it makes sense to bring on someone more experienced.

If it were up to Mason, he’d stay: “If I ever thought I wasn’t the right guy, I’d be the first one to fire myself.”

While at the helm over the past four years, the co-founder has accomplished some pretty awesome milestones — Groupon became the fastest-growing company ever, and had the largest IPO since Google went public. In that time, the thirtysomething Mason has transformed from the office comedian and prankster with uncombed locks to someone who more gracefully conducts himself on conference calls and wears suits to public appearances. While onstage today, he said that the CEO needs to be someone who can attract a strong team, choose a winning strategy and then execute against that strategy.

“I’m flattered that people think that removing me would flatten these bumps,” he added.

Still, as many companies and boards realize, it takes a different skill set to grow a company than it does to run one at enormous scale, and whether the founder is the right fit to guide an organization through its next phase is not always clear. Does Groupon need an Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO, who can be brought in to work closely with the company’s founders, or is Mason a visionary, like Mark Zuckerberg, who can remain successful if surrounded by a few heavy-duty lieutenants?

There is no denying that, over the past year, there have been some major management missteps, which Mason will ultimately have to take responsibility for as the chief executive.

Here are five of them that the board will likely be looking at tomorrow as part of its evaluation as to whether Mason should stay or go:

1. Accounting: Never Groupon’s strong suit; the daily deals company has struggled with its books since before it went public. Prior to its IPO, it was forced to restate revenue and also had to dump a controversial accounting metric that made the company look more profitable than it was. After it went public, the problems continued. Following its first quarterly report, Groupon had to restate its earnings to take into account higher-than-expected returns last year during the holidays.
2. Management turmoil: Earlier this month, the company finally appointed a COO after the seat sat vacant for more than a year. The company picked Kal Raman, who was promoted from SVP of global sales and operations, a job he was essentially doing anyway. This is the third attempt at having an operations guru, after burning through two others in 2011. Neither Margo Georgiadis, who came from Google, or Rob Solomon, who came from Yahoo, lasted long.
3. Maintaining margins: This one is a big deal. Groupon was deemed the fast-growing company because of its tremendous top-line growth, but the real reason the company was considered so valuable was because of its high margins. Local restaurants and merchants were willing to pay big dollars to get new customers in the door. But as sales have started to plateau, the company has started to augment its original business with the sale of physical goods, which has inherently thinner margins. The business is also entering extremely competitive waters where well-established players like Walmart and Amazon operate.
4. European troubles: Part of the company’s promise when it went public was world domination. Groupon was on track to become a household name across the globe by replicating its popular U.S. business model everywhere. But Europe has underperformed. Mason has admitted that Groupon was too focused on capturing market share in those markets and subsequently let innovation and customer and merchant satisfaction slide. As a result, Groupon’s gross bookings revenue have been severely affected.
5. Continued growth: All of the previous issues are well known, but the big challenge going forward will be for Groupon to keep evolving and finding ways for both merchants and customers to continue coming back. Groupon has identified a two-part approach. One includes the sale of Groupon Goods. The other bet is to build more tools and services to make local merchants happy. So far, those tools have included online scheduling software, mobile payments and point-of-sale hardware. As designed, these services are not expected to generate huge amounts of revenue, but rather to continue merchant interest in buying daily deals.

It is a clearly troubled record, and a tough road for a novice CEO to handle. But perhaps the most damning sign is the stock price. While it has risen recently, after Tiger Global Management bought a big stake — and went up almost 5 percent since news of Mason’s possible ouster was reported here yesterday — shares are still off more than 84 percent since Groupon’s IPO a year ago.

In other words, for Mason, it’s a long way down.

The founding CEO of Autonomy today lashed out in an open letter to HP’s board of directors, demanding “immediate and specific allegations” concerning financial and accounting improprieties that HP said on Nov. 20 had artificially inflated the value of the British software company by about $5 billion. HP acquired it in 2011 for about $11 billion.

Lynch insisted that even after a week of public declarations by HP on the issue, he still hasn’t been officially contacted by HP about any of it, and so can’t properly answer allegations about improper accounting and other irregularities. He also reiterated points made in numerous interviews, including one with AllThingsD, that at least some of the problems HP chalks up to accounting malfeasance can be explained away, at least in part, by differences in accounting standards that companies in the U.S. and the U.K. follow, while other problems can be tracked, he says, to HP’s own mismanagement of Autonomy after the deal closed.

There have been other stories, including one in the New York Times on Monday, and one in The Wall Street Journal today, that have added some fascinating anecdotal detail to the inner workings of the relationship between Lynch and other executives, and include some examples of the kinds of transactions that have HP accountants all up in arms.

HP’s response to Lynch’s latest public salvo was pretty straightforward: “We look forward to hearing Dr. Lynch and other former Autonomy employees answer questions under penalty of perjury,” implying, of course, that Lynch will in time be subpoenaed either as a witness or a defendant in a criminal prosecution or civil lawsuit.

At this point, one has to wonder why Lynch is fighting these claims in the media so aggressively, and not taking the expected — and indeed customary — defensive crouch behind a platoon of highly paid lawyers.

He has gone — and remained — on the offensive because, right now, HP is vulnerable, or it is at least perceived to be in a weakened state. With its shares trading close to the lowest point seen in a decade or more, sales in nearly every major business unit on the decline, and plagued by strategic misfires brought on by a succession of CEOs, it is easy to argue in public that HP is the author of its own misfortune.

Also, it doesn’t hurt Lynch that the deal for Autonomy was completed under the messy 11-month stint of former CEO Léo Apotheker, who was ultimately deemed by HP’s board to be unprepared for the task of running the world’s largest technology company. This same board — including current CEO Meg Whitman — simultaneously endorsed much of Apotheker’s vision at the same moment it decided he lacked the competence to carry it out.

Lynch’s PR strategy is simple: Muddy the waters. Charges of mismanagement coupled with anecdotal tales of jaw-dropping corporate and bureaucratic stupidity, poor business choices and differences in accounting standards may not logically add up to a $5 billion explanation. But given HP’s current state, the court of public opinion can’t help but wonder if HP isn’t trying to heap as much blame as it can for its current woes on Lynch and an overvalued Autonomy.

But imagine for a second if, in this drama, HP was replaced by IBM. Perhaps I’m wrong, but somehow I doubt Lynch would be quite so willing to fight so aggressively or so publicly without first having lawyered up. But then it wouldn’t be as interesting to write about.

(Image taken from the English children’s book and animated cartoon “Mr. Chatterbox.”)

“Having no details beyond the limited public information provided last week, and still with no further contact from you, I am writing today to ask you, the board of HP, for immediate and specific explanations for the allegations HP is making,” Lynch wrote. “HP should provide me with the interim report and any other documents which you say you have provided to the SEC and the SFO so that I can answer whatever is alleged, instead of the selective disclosure of non-material information via background discussions with the media.”

Lynch essentially repeated much of what he has already said in numerous interviews, including one with AllThingsD last week. But he also seeks an explanation as to how HP decided to write down $5 billion on the value of Autonomy, which made up the majority of the $8.8 billion write-down the company announced alongside its earnings report last week.

He also asks why HP waited six months, after first learning about the alleged improprieties, to inform shareholders.

Here’s the full text of the letter, which arrived in my inbox only moments ago:

Open Letter from Dr Mike Lynch to the Board of Directors of Hewlett-Packard
27 November 2012
To: The Board of Directors of Hewlett-Packard Company
On 20 November Hewlett-Packard (HP) issued a statement accusing unspecified members of Autonomy’s former management team of serious financial impropriety. It was shocking that HP put non-specific but highly damaging allegations into the public domain without prior notification or contact with me, as former CEO of Autonomy.
I utterly reject all allegations of impropriety.
Autonomy’s finances, during its years as a public company and including the time period in question, were handled in accordance with applicable regulations and accounting practices. Autonomy’s accounts were overseen by independent auditors Deloitte LLC, who have confirmed the application of all appropriate procedures including those dictated by the International Financial Reporting Standards used in the UK.
Having no details beyond the limited public information provided last week, and still with no further contact from you, I am writing today to ask you, the board of HP, for immediate and specific explanations for the allegations HP is making. HP should provide me with the interim report and any other documents which you say you have provided to the SEC and the SFO so that I can answer whatever is alleged, instead of the selective disclosure of non-material information via background discussions with the media.
I believe it is in the interest of all stakeholders, and the public record, for HP to respond to a number of questions:
• Many observers are stunned by HP’s claim that these allegations account for a $5 billion write down and fail to understand how HP reaches that number. Please publish the calculations used to determine the $5 billion impairment charge. Please provide a breakdown of the relative contribution for revenue, cash flow, profit and write down in relation to:
• The alleged “mischaracterization” of hardware that HP did not realize Autonomy sold, as I understand this would have no effect on annual top or bottom lines and a minor effect on gross margin within normal fluctuations and no impact on growth, assuming a steady state over the period;
• The alleged “inappropriate acceleration of revenue recognition with value-added resellers” and the “[creation of] revenue where no end-user customer existed at the time of sale”, given their normal treatment under IFRS; and
• The allegations of incorrect revenue recognition of long-term arrangements of hosted deals, again given the normal treatment under IFRS.
• In order to justify a $5 billion accounting write down, a significant amount of revenue must be involved. Please explain how such issues could possibly have gone undetected during the extensive acquisition due diligence process and HP’s financial oversight of Autonomy for a year from acquisition until October 2012 (a period during which all of the Autonomy finance reported to HP’s CFO Cathie Lesjak).
• Can HP really state that no part of the $5 billion write down was, or should be, attributed to HP’s operational and financial mismanagement of Autonomy since the acquisition?
• How many people employed by Autonomy in September 2011 have left or resigned under the management of HP?
• HP raised issues about the inclusion of hardware in Autonomy’s IDOL Product revenue, notwithstanding this being in accordance with proper IFRS accounting practice. Please confirm that Ms Whitman and other HP senior management were aware of Autonomy’s hardware sales before 2012. Did Autonomy, as part of HP, continue to sell third-party hardware of materially similar value after acquisition? Was this accounted for by HP and was this reported in the Autonomy segment of their accounts?
• Were Ms Whitman and Ms Lesjak aware that Paul Curtis (HP’s Worldwide Director of Software Revenue Recognition), KPMG and Ernst & Young undertook in December 2011 detailed studies of Autonomy’s software revenue recognition with a view to optimising for US GAAP?
• Why did HP senior management apparently wait six months to inform its shareholders of the possibility of a material event related to Autonomy?
Hewlett Packard is an iconic technology company, which was historically admired and respected all over the world. Autonomy joined forces with HP with real hopes for the future and in the belief that together there was an opportunity to make HP great again. I have been truly saddened by the events of the past months, and am shocked and appalled by the events of the past week.
I believe it is in the best interests of all parties for this situation to be resolved as quickly as possible.
I am placing this letter in the public domain in the interests of complete transparency.

Yours faithfully,
Dr Mike Lynch

Update: Responding to Lynch’s open letter, HP issued the following statement:

“HP has initiated an intense internal investigation into a series of accounting improprieties, disclosure failures and outright misrepresentations that occurred prior to HP’s acquisition of Autonomy. We believe we have uncovered extensive evidence of a willful effort on behalf of certain former Autonomy employees to inflate the underlying financial metrics of the company in order to mislead investors and potential buyers.

“The matter is in the hands of the authorities, including the UK Serious Fraud Office, the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s Enforcement Division and the US Department of Justice, and we will defer to them as to how they wish to engage with Dr. Lynch. In addition, HP will take legal action against the parties involved at the appropriate time.

“While Dr. Lynch is eager for a debate, we believe the legal process is the correct method in which to bring out the facts and take action on behalf of our shareholders. In that setting, we look forward to hearing Dr. Lynch and other former Autonomy employees answer questions under penalty of perjury.”

In an interview with Reuters, Lynch, who was dismissed from running Autonomy by HP CEO Meg Whitman in May, says he’s gone through the books of his former firm and has found that differences between the accounting standards observed in the U.S. and in the United Kingdom can account for at least some of the differences in how things are interpreted.

Lynch made similar comments in an interview with AllThingsD Tuesday, though he hasn’t sought to put any numbers behind the contention.

Like most U.S.-based companies, HP followed GAAP, the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles put out by the U.S.-based non-profit Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB). As a U.K. company, Autonomy had adhered instead to the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) maintained by the International Accounting Standards Committee.

Lynch has maintained that differences in how revenue is recognized under the two systems leave a lot of room for interpretation in some of the matters in which he and his senior managers stand accused. One relates to licensing revenue. When a company bundles the cost of a software license, service and support into a single ongoing contract, GAAP accounting rules are more strict than IFRS rules in how the payments are accounted.

Answering one of the big accusations by HP, Lynch acknowledged that, at least some of the time, Autonomy did sell desktop machines with Autonomy software installed at a slight loss. In those cases, the customer would agree to help Autonomy market its product and, in those cases, the losses were recorded as marketing expenses. HP says that these improperly recorded hardware sales inflated Autonomy’s revenue by as much as 10 percent to 15 percent prior to its acquisition by HP.

Another difference:Cases where Autonomy would sell its software through 400 middleman companies known as Value Added Resellers (VAR), who turn around and sell the software as part of larger package deals. In Autonomy’s case, some of those VARs included both IBM and India’s Wipro. Under IFRS rules, a sale to a VAR can be booked as revenue before the resale takes place. Under GAAP, it’s not revenue to Autonomy until the resale takes place.

Lynch has also said that once HP took over at Autonomy, its own practices and bureaucracy slowed things down. Salespeople were paid commissions to sell products that compete with Autonomy, he said, but not for selling Autonomy products. On top of that, he accused HP of jacking up prices on the Autonomy software by 30 percent, driving loyal customers away.

He also said in numerous interviews that HP had “ambushed” him with all this, and that he had no idea what was coming. That’s not quite true, according to sources in HP’s camp, who say that the company had a conversation with him in mid-June, after a former member of Lynch’s senior management team is said to have come forward as a whistleblower. “He has been aware since then that we had questions about all of this,” one source told me. HP execs considered his answers to their questions to be “not satisfactory at all.”

At that point, I’m told, communications between HP and Lynch and other former Autonomy executives ended. After CEO Meg Whitman hinted, in remarks at an analysts meeting in San Francisco in October, that more restatements might be coming, certain former Autonomy executives started calling around to friends and former colleagues still working for HP, trying to find out what was coming. They had reason to expect a sizable impairment charge. What has apparently caught Lynch, et al, by surprise, is the referral to the authorities in the U.S. and the U.K. for possible criminal investigation. In the U.S., the FBI is said to be taking the lead.

One observation: Lynch tells Reuters he hasn’t yet lawyered up, which, if he hadn’t said it, would be pretty obvious anyway. Any lawyer worth their fee would have advised Lynch to stop talking publicly about all of this.

(Image of Jon Lovitz as “Master Thespian,” circa 1985. Yes, I’m dating myself.)

RELATED POSTS:

• More From Mike Lynch: HP’s Autonomy Accusations Are Getting Weaker
• Mike Lynch Punches Back at Today’s HP Filing: Whither $5B Writedown?
• HP Confirms DOJ Is Investigating Alleged Fraud in Autonomy Deal
• Yes, There Are Layoffs Pending at HP’s Autonomy Unit in the U.K.
• Former HP CEO Shifts Blame for Autonomy Deal to Chairman
• Dell Passed on Autonomy Before HP Bought It
• Why Mike Lynch Is Playing PR Hardball With HP
• Autonomy Founder Lynch Asks Board to Explain HP Allegations
• Autonomy Founder Lynch Blames Accounting Standards in HP Flap
• The Red Flags That Were Obvious — To Some — In the HP-Autonomy Deal
• Oracle’s Ellison Vindicated in Autonomy PR Flap by HP’s $8.8 Billion Writedown
• Autonomy Founder Mike Lynch Rejects HP Charges, Alleges Mismanagement
• What Exactly Happened at Autonomy?
• HP Explains Its $8.8 Billion “Oops”
• HP Beats Street Amid Sales Declines, Takes $8.8 Billion Charge
• HP Names Microsoft Exec Robert Youngjohns to Run Autonomy
• Search Under Way at HP for Autonomy’s Next Chief
• Autonomy’s Mike Lynch Talks About Being HP’s Speedy Tiger Cub (Video)
• Britain’s First Software Billionaire Now Reports to HP CEO Meg Whitman
• Oracle Launches Exalytics Machine, Probably Ending Spat With Autonomy
• Autonomy: When All Else Fails, Blame the Bankers
• Mike Lynch to Oracle: Oh, You Mean Those Slides
• Oracle: You Have a Very Bad Memory, Mr. Lynch
• HP Reportedly Close to $10 Billion Buyout of Autonomy, PC Unit Spinoff
• Will Oracle and Microsoft Bid on Autonomy?

It turns out there were, and a few smart short-sellers — the most obvious one is Jim Chanos of Kynikos Associates, who in the last 24 hours has been hailed as a bit of a god of short-selling wisdom on CNBC — who read the situation correctly and made money.

There are others who saw troubles at Autonomy that should have occurred to HP’s due diligence team. One is John Hempton, of Australia’s Bronte Capital. In a blog post this morning he sums it up this way: Good software companies tend to have low receivables and higher unearned income on their profit/loss and balance sheets. At Autonomy, it was the reverse.

Here’s a little Accounting 101: A receivable is a debt a company is owed and expects to be paid. If you buy a car from your neighbor and pay him half now and half next month, he’s counting on the fact that he’s going to be paid that other half next month. This is a receivable, and on a corporate balance sheet it goes in the assets column. This is how it tends to work for durable and tangible goods, which software is not.

Software is usually sold for cash up front, and then any further payments tend to come from either service and support on an ongoing basis or, as in the case of companies like Workday or Salesforce.com, as subscription revenue. In either case, the company selling it can’t report the ongoing payments as income because it hasn’t been paid yet, and since there are no tangible goods involved, the risk of not being paid is higher. The customer could go out of business or cancel the subscription or simply stop paying. As such, the expected future payments can’t be counted as assets, and in fact have to be accounted for as a liability, essentially money that might be lost. Sometimes they’re called “deferred revenue” or “unearned income.” Still, these numbers can and often do provide a strong indication of future revenue, which is why cloud software companies like Salesforce, Netsuite and Workday report them regularly.

So here’s how Hempton describes what he says was the most glaring problem that should have been obvious to the team at HP conducting due diligence on Autonomy:

Sales were $870 million.

Receivables were $330 million — which is four and a half months of receivables.

Deferred revenue is $177 million — just over half of receivables.

This is really perverse for a software company. Software companies sell stuff that is barely tangible — they sell it up front and for cash. They have very few receivables.

They do however have an obligation to service that software for a long time after they sell it — so the unearned income is relatively large (usually a multiple of receivables).

Autonomy was booking as income lots of cash it had not received (which is why the receivables were large) and not booking any obligation to provide future services for that income.

This is prima-facie suspect (and you could tell simply by looking at the balance sheet). All it required was basic applied accounting.

Here’s another warning sign. I’ve talked to a few people familiar with traditional ways of valuing software companies, and they tell me that Autonomy’s operating margins, which grew from 15 percent in 2005 and surpassed 50 percent by early 2010, were too high to make sense.

Autonomy, they say, hadn’t grown to sufficient scale — at sales just shy of $1 billion with a relatively small base of customers — to make margins in the upper 40 percent range realistic or likely. Software companies increase their margins by boosting the number of customers they sell to. The more customers you have, the better to amortize your research and development costs, which are essentially the only real costs associated with creating software.

The thing is, once you make a sale, R&D costs don’t recur. The sale to the second, third, fourth and fifth customers are, aside from any marketing and costs incurred to make the sale itself, essentially pure profit. With a larger customer base, each customer accounts for a smaller and smaller sliver of the R&D cost. And once you incur the R&D cost, it’s over with. Thus, margin and revenue move together.

As one executive of a software company who didn’t want to named observed to me today: “Autonomy didn’t have the scale to achieve the margins they claimed. Once you understand that, it’s impossible to see how what HP paid made sense.” Hm.

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Calling from the U.K., Lynch said that he had been “ambushed” by HP’s accusations, and that he hasn’t been contacted in any official capacity by HP, its lawyers or anyone else; the first he heard about the accusations against Autonomy management was via the press release.

He went on to accuse HP of mismanaging Autonomy and essentially sabotaging its performance after the $11.7 billion acquisition closed. He said that once Autonomy was in the HP tent, HP managers arbitrarily added a 30 percent markup on Autonomy software, which had the effect of driving some longtime customers away. In other cases, Lynch said, HP salespeople were paid commissions to sell third-party products that competed with Autonomy, but no commissions to sell Autonomy products.

Below is a transcript of our conversation:

AllThingsD: Mike, thanks for the call. I presume you have a different view of events concerning the accusations leveled by HP against your former company, Autonomy.

Lynch: Basically, we reject completely the assertion of HP. It’s completely wrong. The reality of the situation is that when HP bought Autonomy it had hundreds of people involved in due diligence, which was described at the time as “meticulous.” And KPMG, Barclays and Perello were all involved there. And they’ve actually run it for a year. To somehow admit a $9 billion elephant in the room just beggars belief, frankly.

What do you think of the specifics of the allegations? There were hardware sales, sales of software to value-added resellers, and some concerning some subscription revenue that was booked incorrectly. Can you address any of the specifics?

I don’t know any of the specifics because no one has been in touch with us. We’ve not heard anything from any partner other than what’s been in the press release. It’s been a bit of an ambush. I don’t know what she’s referring to or why. Obviously, there are differences between IFRS [International Financial Reporting Standards] accounting and the U.S. GAAP system, but the fact is that all our financial information was given to Deloitte, which, unlike most European accounting firms, audited us every quarter. And consequently we’re confident in the numbers being right.

Do you anticipate being sued personally by HP, or investigated criminally in this matter? Have you retained counsel?

As I said, I’ve heard nothing from anyone, not even from HP. You’re the first person that has mentioned these to me. I completely and absolutely reject the suggestions. So let’s see some evidence and we’ll explain it from there. All we’ve done is gotten a press release. There haven’t been any of the lawyer letters that one might expect in a matter such as this.

The sad thing about this is that it’s a distraction. Having been on HP’s Executive Council, I walked into a company that was riddled with internecine warfare, and obviously Léo Apotheker and Shane Robison [HP's former chief strategy officer] had a strategy, which was about taking down certain parts of the business and divesting them. And obviously there was another one of those Hewlett-Packard coup d’etats. And Léo and Shane were out, and the other divisions became more powerful, and we obviously had a very hard time inside HP.

What you saw was a situation where hundreds of the Autonomy staff left — remember, it was a pretty small company with a small staff — they all left, and the senior management team left. There was significant mismanagement of the asset. So the quarter when the numbers at Autonomy went south was the quarter that HP took over and took over the sales process.

They did things like, if the customer had an enterprise sales agreement with Autonomy, they could no longer buy through Autonomy, they had to buy through HP’s Enterprise Services Group. And ES insisted on putting a 30 percent markup on the software. So, suddenly, established customers had to pay 30 percent more for that software. And that is just one of a long list of examples.

If an HP salesperson sold a competitive product, they got a commission. If they sold Autonomy, they didn’t. These are the kinds of internal issues that went on and greatly damaged the Autonomy business and led to a great number of the Autonomy staff leaving. Since the management team has left, it’s sad to see that the company’s prospects have deteriorated. And I guess that is what is behind this write-off.

It sounds like much of this goes back to the fundamental question of Léo Apotheker’s strategy. He wanted to move HP toward high-margin businesses like software and get out of low-margin hardware like PCs and printers.

There was a strategy which the board of directors had authorized Léo and Shane to carry out, and acquiring Autonomy was a key part of that decision. When they were ousted, the decision to divest the hardware business was reversed, and you had a very messy strategic situation.

Then it really comes down to questions of accounting, and you think it can all be properly explained.

If we are given the chance to explain it, it can all be properly explained. You will see that all the information was given to our auditors, who made the correct decisions under IFRS, I have no doubt.

Meg was on CNBC and on conference calls today, laying much of this at your door, if not directly, then by inference, reminding people that she let you go after Autonomy failed to make its numbers, and so forth. We’ve never heard the other side of that conversation. Can you give any insight into it?

Sadly, when these things happen one gets gagged. The reason why those numbers were low in that quarter was because of the switchover to HP managing the sales process. As I said, arbitrary markups were added on, and commissions were given to people to sell against Autonomy. And Autonomy deals were wrapped up into packages, which means that the normal course of selling software at the end of the quarter was defeated. So this is just an example of what went on, and what we’re really talking about is a company not understanding the software business. And not understanding an acquisition. I’m afraid it’s an ongoing situation. You saw it with Palm and with EDS. And the important thing about Autonomy is that it has a great history. Obviously, for the first two quarters the business was fine within HP until these management changes were put in place. There were silly things like divisions of HP refusing to sell Autonomy because it hadn’t been certified by them. This kind of internal bureaucracy and infighting going on there led to the staff leaving. Autonomy is the kind of company where the staff is really vital, and there were hundreds lost during that spring period. And then most of the senior management team left. By then, the company was so damaged, to the point where the numbers are not going to continue on the line that you would like them to.

HP says it was a member of your senior management team who came forward with these allegations. Do you know who that is, and can you name them?

No. Again, I have no idea what they’re talking about. I don’t believe any of the senior people are still there. So I’m afraid I’m in the dark.

Is it possible, then, from your point of view, that HP is trying to take a big charge, recalibrate its financial position and simply lay as much of the blame as possible on Autonomy?

I think the reality is that the business has not been managed in the last year. It’s not inconceivable that the business has gone down in value. The question here is about the amount. I suspect that every spare cent has been thrown into this write-down. Meg has spent the day talking about this, more than she has about delivering the worst results in HP’s 70-year history. HP needs to think more about the fundamental problems of its business. I hope they can rebuild what was once a great Silicon Valley company.

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Read the rest of this post on the original site »

First, HP’s total $8.8 billion write-down isn’t all Autonomy-related. Of that total amount, about $5 billion relates specifically to Autonomy. Moments ago, on a conference call with reporters, HP CFO Cathie Lesjak said that the rest stems from the drop in HP’s share price.

The core allegation is that people at Autonomy took certain accounting actions while still running Autonomy as a publicly held company in the U.K., which had the end effect of making Autonomy seem more valuable than it was. As CEO Meg Whitman put it on a conference call a few minutes ago: “There appears to have been a wilfull effort on the part of certain former Autonomy employees to inflate the underlying financials of the company in order to mislead investors and potential buyers.”

It’s important to note that Autonomy’s founder and former CEO Mike Lynch has just issued a statement, essentially denying HP’s claims. I heard portions of the statement read on CNBC. In a statement being reported by Reuters, he has “flatly rejected” HP’s allegations. Also: “HP’s due diligence review was intensive, overseen on behalf of HP by KPMG, Barclays and Perella Weinberg. HP’s senior management has also been closely involved with running Autonomy for the past year.”

So what is alleged to have happened? For one thing, Autonomy, as HP tells it, was selling some hardware at a loss. During a period of about eight quarters prior to HP’s acquisition, Autonomy sold some hardware products that had a very low margin or on which it may have even taken a loss. It then allegedly turned around and booked those hardware sales as high-margin software sales. At least some portion of the cost on these products, Whitman said, was booked as a marketing expense, not as cost of goods sold.

There’s a second piece of the puzzle, where HP says that Autonomy was selling software to value-added resellers — the middlemen in so many technology transactions — in which there are ultimately no end users. That, too, inflated apparent revenue.

Third, there were some long-term hosting deals — essentially, Autonomy hosting applications for its customers on a subscription basis — that were converted to short-term licensing deals. Future revenue for software subscriptions — that should have been deferred or recorded as coming in the future but not yet booked — were stripped out and booked all at once.

John Schultz, HP’s general counsel, said there appeared to be what he called “a conscious effort by some former Autonomy employees to portray it as a pure software company.” The low-margin or loss-making hardware sales in particular, he said on the conference call, amounted to as much as 10 percent to 15 percent of Autonomy’s revenue during the eight-quarter period in question.

It had the effect, Schultz said, of not only closing the gap between actual financial growth and the consensus expectation of analysts — meeting the consensus is always a concern at a publicly held company — but also inflated the “growth metrics” of the company. “From an accounting perspective, there were improprieties, but also there were severe disclosure failures,” he said.

Lesjak said the problems are not only with the fact that revenue was inflated by itself, but the kinds of revenue. “These hardware sales were frequently reported as licenses. The VAR sales were reported as licenses, and they weren’t, in some sense, real sales, because there was no end user.”

The result, Lesjak said, was that Autonomy was able to boost its gross margins, a key measurement of profitability. Where Autonomy had been reporting gross margins in the neighborhood of 40 percent to 45 percent, Lesjak said a more realistic gross margin at Autonomy going forward is in the 28 percent to 30 percent range.

So what is HP going to do about it? First, it has reported the matter to the enforcement division of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and to the Serious Fraud Office in the U.K. Once those authorities have their say, HP will likely sue someone. Whitman conceded that it will likely take years before it’s all done. It’s going to get ugly before it’s over.

The Wall Street Journal just got a statement from former HP CEO Léo Apotheker, who did the Autonomy deal during his 11-month tenure as CEO. In a word, he says he’s “stunned.” He will also make himself available to help HP get to the bottom of it all.

Whitman was just on CNBC for several minutes, going through the particulars and reiterating much of what she said on the conference call with reporters. Here’s the video:

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It’s not well known, but last year, before it went public, Groupon almost didn’t.

With pressure from former board member Howard Schultz, and also doubts about timing expressed to CEO Andrew Mason by outside investors such as Silicon Valley luminaries Marc Andreessen and Mary Meeker, the Chicago-based daily deals site pressed forward, anyway.

Since then, it has been a tough ride for Groupon and, perhaps most of all, for Mason.

Yesterday afternoon, I got on Skype to do a video interview with him about the continued swirl — much of it very negative — around the company he co-founded and leads.

“I love Groupon,” he said. “Groupon is my life.”

Not so much everyone else these days — who are starting to compare the company to Web 1.0 flameout Webvan and even, in the ultimate digital insult, Pets.com.

That’s a false comparison — those were both never profitable, and had negative cash flow, unlike the much larger Groupon.

Still, Groupon’s stock has been under pressure pretty much since the time of its IPO last year, with critics hammering on everything from whether its business plan is fundamentally flawed to its controversial accounting to the goofy nature of Mason himself.

He even got dinged for drinking a beer at a Groupon all-hands employee meeting. (I’m fine with that one, by the way.)

Groupon shares hit a new low last week, after it reported second-quarter earnings that showed better profits, but a revenue miss. Growth prospects in its core coupon business, or lack thereof, was pointed to by Wall Street investors for the continued sell-off.

One bright spot was its nine-month-old Groupon Goods, which sells a variety of products and which has grown to $200 million in annualized revenue. But the lower-margin offering makes up a smaller part of the company’s overall results, as does its impressive improvements in mobile commerce.

These two positive developments have failed to impress, though, with the stock at even lower lows today — at $4.74 a share. That’s down 82 percent since Groupon went public, making the company worth $3 billion, or about half of what Google had once offered to buy it, and a little more than double its cash on hand.

In other words, it is crunch time for Mason, who must answer to shareholders, employees and his board, and must somehow get Groupon to a better place, and fast.

Among the myriad of risks for him as he does: Everything from new management to the sale of Groupon.

That is not in the cards right now, of course. And, as usual, the affable exec talks with confidence about the company.

To his credit, in this long interview, he is also pretty candid about the struggle.

It’s well worth a watch (except for me looking like I just got off a red-eye flight, which I did).

Here’s Mason:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120817/video-exclusive-heres-groupons-andrew-mason-talking-about-daily-deals-sites-stock-smack-future-plans-and-ipo-regrets-or-lack-thereof/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120809/mine-mine-all-mine-yahoo-says-it-might-just-keep-that-alibaba-money-for-itself-instead-for-shareholders/ http://allthingsd.com/20120809/mine-mine-all-mine-yahoo-says-it-might-just-keep-that-alibaba-money-for-itself-instead-for-shareholders/#comments Thu, 09 Aug 2012 20:50:48 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=239824

Yahoo just filed a regulatory document noting that it might not give back the bulk of the $4 billion-plus that it is expecting to get from its sale of a chunk of its Alibaba stake to shareholders, as it had previously said it would, either via a stock buyback or dividend.

Instead, CEO Marissa Mayer looks like she wants all that dough to buy some tasty companies.

The filing noted that Mayer’s recent look-see review of Yahoo, “may lead to a reevaluation of, or changes to, our current plans, including our restructuring plan, our share repurchase program, and our previously announced plans for returning to shareholders substantially all of the after tax cash proceeds of the initial share repurchase.”

Yahoo’s stock is down about five percent on the news, in after-hours trading, to $15.28. It had been moving up slowly in recent weeks.

That’s because, for investors, this is a drastic reversal of previous Yahoo statements on what it was going to do with the windfall. At the time of the deal and then later in several statements by its top execs, Yahoo said it would return the most of the money to shareholders.

“We look forward to delivering the proceeds of the near-term transaction to our shareholders,” said CFO Tim Morse at the time of the deal’s announcement in May, which he later reiterated on an earnings call.

Related to the deal, the Yahoo board had also recently authorized its execs to conduct a larger stock buyback, although the company was under no legal obligation to do so.

In addition, in a recent letter to his investors, Third Point’s Dan Loeb — now a Yahoo director and in charge of a six percent stake — said the company “has indicated that it will return substantially all of the expected $5B of cash it will receive from this transaction to shareholders.”

No longer — at least for most of the incoming pile of moolah from China.

Still, the move probably should come as no surprise, given Mayer is already on the prowl for innovative companies to buy and talent to “acqhire.”

She’ll certainly need a bigger war chest, since Yahoo only has just above $2 billion in cash now, not all of which is available (long accounting reason I will go into later).

The big slug of Alibaba money, from selling half of Yahoo’s stake in the Chinese company, will obviously give her more heft.

So, too, would any money she might get from a deal around Yahoo’s Japanese assets. The company has been in protracted talks with SoftBank, its partner there, about such a sale. While sources said it was close to completion, there appears to still be some roadblocks to its final settlement.

Depending on how such a transaction is completed — tax-free or not — Yahoo could get about $3 billion in cash and perhaps another asset worth $1.5 billion.

That would certainly give Mayer a bigger kitty to do acquisitions — and presumably make lots of friends in Silicon Valley in the process.

Here is the pertinent section of the filing:

New Chief Executive Officer and Review of Business Strategy

On July 17, 2012, Marissa Mayer became the Chief Executive Officer and a member of the Board of Directors of Yahoo! Inc. (the “Company”). As reported in our Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2012 filed today with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Ms. Mayer is engaging in a review of the Company’s business strategy to enhance long term shareholder value. As part of that review, Ms. Mayer intends to review with the Board of Directors, among other things, the Company’s growth and acquisition strategy, the restructuring plan we began implementing in the second quarter of 2012, and the Company’s cash position and planned capital allocation strategy. This review process may lead to a reevaluation of, or changes to, our current plans, including our restructuring plan, our share repurchase program, and our previously announced plans for returning to shareholders substantially all of the after tax cash proceeds of the initial share repurchase under the Share Repurchase and Preference Share Sale Agreement we entered into on May 20, 2012 with Alibaba Group Holding Limited.

And here is the whole filing:

YHOO-20120809-8K-20120809

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120809/mine-mine-all-mine-yahoo-says-it-might-just-keep-that-alibaba-money-for-itself-instead-for-shareholders/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120503/in-2009-interview-yahoo-ceo-does-not-deny-he-has-a-cs-degree-and-calls-himself-an-engineer/ http://allthingsd.com/20120503/in-2009-interview-yahoo-ceo-does-not-deny-he-has-a-cs-degree-and-calls-himself-an-engineer/#comments Fri, 04 May 2012 06:22:41 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=203636

On March 25, 2009, Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson — when he was then president of PayPal — appeared on the TechNation radio show to talk about the revival of the eBay payments unit.

At the end of the largely charming interview, Moira Gunn asked him a direct question about his college degrees, specifically noting they were in accounting and computer science.

“Your bachelor’s degree is in accounting and computer science. Now, from both of those, I mean that’s, that’s pretty obvious that’s PayPal,” said Gunn. “What are the most important things you learned?”

“Yeah,” begins Thompson, failing to correct her at all on the fact that he does not actually have a computer science degree — only one in accounting.

He then went even further, touting his early tech training at Stonehill College, near Boston, which did not offer a computer science degree at the time he went there, from 1975 to 1979.

“And that’s really the background that I have, and it started back in my college days, and I think that’s really the wonderful part of being an engineer is you think that way,” said Thompson.

In the most generous interpretation, it’s not quite clear whether Thompson was saying “Yeah” to her statement of his academic credentials, or if he was not actually listening.

But it’s a careless oversight on his part not to have corrected her about the degrees, which could also be said about a computer science degree being present on his bio for more than a half-dozen years at eBay and later at Yahoo without some notice by him.

Because while Thompson has had a long career as a tech exec, as well as a stint as a CIO, academically speaking, a computer science degree did not happen in his college days nor did he graduate as an engineer.

That became apparent earlier today, when Yahoo confirmed that it included inaccurate information about Thompson’s academic background on its Web site and in its regulatory filings.

The admission came after activist shareholder Dan Loeb of Third Point correctly asserted that Thompson’s resume was overstated related to his education.

Yahoo called the inclusion of the computer science degree on his bio an “inadvertent error,” but gave no other explanation as yet. Tonight, the Yahoo board said it was reviewing the matter and would then make appropriate disclosures afterward.

While it is entirely possible that Thompson did not correctly grok what Gunn was saying, it seems pretty clear that he implied his college background was in tech and he was an engineer.

It is true that Thompson did take some computer science classes at Stonehill. And it is entirely possible that he thinks of himself as an engineer by work training and not by college degree.

I am awaiting comment from Yahoo PR, which has its hands full today (welcome to the circus, Amanda!).

Until then, here is the actual audio of that part of the interview and the pertinent part of the transcript, which began at the 26:33 time on the audio, to judge for yourself:

Gunn: Your bachelor’s degree is in accounting and computer science. Now, from both of those, I mean that’s, that’s pretty obvious that’s Paypal. What are the most important things you learned?

Thompson: Yeah. You know, I think and I, I mention this to young kids when I’m on campus, and my son who I was just talking about at Santa Clara, what I’m happiest about in my background is if you work in technology you’re trained to solve problems.

And that’s really it, you’re trained to pull apart very complex things and think about okay, how can I do this or how can I do that or how can I make it better?

And that’s really the background that I have and it started back in my college days, and I think that’s really the wonderful part of being an engineer is you think that way.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120503/in-2009-interview-yahoo-ceo-does-not-deny-he-has-a-cs-degree-and-calls-himself-an-engineer/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120503/yahoos-board-will-review-resume-discrepancy-of-ceo/ http://allthingsd.com/20120503/yahoos-board-will-review-resume-discrepancy-of-ceo/#comments Fri, 04 May 2012 02:28:55 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=203599

Yahoo just released a statement that its board will “review” today’s revelation that the bio of its CEO Scott Thompson contained an error related to his educational achievements and will make “appropriate disclosure” about what happened.

On both the Web site and in the regulatory filings of the Silicon Valley Internet giant, Thompson is described as having a degree in both computer science and accounting from Stonehill College.

He does not have a degree in computer science from the Boston-based school, but does have a Bachelor’s of Science in Business Administration (Accounting).

Yahoo said in full in its statement:

“In connection with the statement the company made earlier today about Scott Thompson, the Yahoo! board will be reviewing this matter, and upon completion of its review, will make an appropriate disclosure to shareholders.”

Earlier today, Yahoo first blamed the issue on an “inadvertent error” — but provided no further details — which sources said did not sit well with the board.

“Many members of the board are deeply concerned,” said one person with knowledge of its thinking. “This is a problem on a lot of levels, especially related to the trust of shareholders.”

Indeed, especially since the news came to light via activist shareholder Dan Loeb of Third Point, who is agitating for board seats via a proxy fight.

Loeb’s efforts to impugn Thompson appear to have caused some level of damage, at least in terms of perception about the level of vetting that was done when the former president of eBay’s PayPal unit was hired earlier this year.

In fact, the error has been around for a half-dozen years, which begs the question of why Thompson never noticed it.

While his bio on filings made by eBay to the Securities and Exchange Commission were accurate, the one on the online commerce site’s Web site incorrectly said he had a computer science degree.

It is not known who introduced the error there.

But the inaccuracy moved inexplicably to both Yahoo’s corporate Web site and also its SEC filings, and the company declined to provide any details earlier today as to how that happened.

It’s not clear what happens next, or if there are any legal implications, beyond a needed correction by Yahoo with the SEC — which already took the entire line about Thompson’s education off his Web bio today.

As I wrote earlier today:

Thompson himself is probably not at risk unless it can be definitely proved he was the one who misrepresented having the degree in the first place. He can simply say he had no idea who added it to the eBay Web site and that he did not notice it there on the Yahoo Web site and SEC filings.

While that makes him look careless, how big a deal it becomes with shareholders, as well as Yahoo employees, is also an unknown. While a computer science degree is not a requirement for a CEO of a tech company — both Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft’s Bill Gates dropped out of college and did pretty well in computer science anyway — tech resume padding, even inadvertent, is not a characteristic that is going endear Thompson to anyone.

The controversy could not have come at a worse time — Thompson was actually in meetings all day yesterday and today with senior staff, following recent layoffs of 2,000 and a massive restructuring, to discuss plans for moving the long-troubled company forward.

And besides the proxy fight, he is also dealing with selling off Yahoo’s Asian assets, renegotiating a new search deal with Microsoft, and also trying to figure out what parts of Yahoo to keep and what parts to jettison to improve its prospects.

RELATED POSTS:

• Yahoo’s Parting With Thompson Will Be for “Cause” (a.k.a. CSLie)
• Ross Levinsohn’s Yahoo Plan: Back to the Future
• Here’s New Yahoo CEO’s First Note to Troops! (The Leaking-Internal-Memos-to-ATD Policy Remains in Effect As Usual)
• Yahoo Officially Confirms ATD Report on CEO Changes and Proxy Settlement
• Meet the Man I Call “The Hair”: The Video Stylings of Yahoo’s Newest CEO Ross Levinsohn
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• Heidrick & Struggles Slaps Back at Thompson’s Yahoo in Blame Game Over ResuMess
• Is He In or Is He Out? Crunchtime for Scott Thompson at Yahoo.
• Not So Scott Free? Yahoo’s Other Big Shareholder — Cap Re — Leaning Toward Supporting Loeb Over Thompson ResuMess.
• Tech Nation’s Gunn Says She and Yahoo CEO Discussed Their CS Degrees Before 2009 Show (Video and Audio)
• Loeb Calls Again for Thompson Firing From Yahoo, as Former eBay Boss Supports Him
• Place Your Bets: Will Loeb Drop Another Bomb on Yahoo at Vegas Confab Later Today?
• Exclusive: Yahoo Director in Charge of Botched CEO Vetting to Step Down From Board
• CEO Says Sorry to Yahoos for Borked Bio “Distraction” — But Will Mea Culpa Work Without an Apology for Error? (Memo)
• Buffett Comments on Trust Issue in Yahoo CEO BioGate: “You’ve Got a Problem”
• Loeb Lobs Lawsuit, as Expected, at Yahoo’s Borked Bio Mess
• As Yahoo CEO Reaches Out to Top Staff, Board Meets to Weigh “Options” (I.E., Deciding Who Gets to Take the Borked Bio Blame)
• Yahoo Should Expect Incoming Lawsuit Lobbed by Loeb Tomorrow on CEO Hiring
• They Shoot Yahoo CEOs, Don’t They? But Not Without a Really Smoking Gun and a Much Stronger Board.
• Yahoo’s Thompson Asks Employees to “Stay Focused” — Except Not on Him
• In 2009 Interview, Yahoo CEO Does Not Deny He Has a CS Degree, and Calls Himself an “Engineer” (Audio)
• Yahoo’s Board Will “Review” Resume Discrepancy of CEO
• How Did a Phantom CS Degree Get on CEO’s Bio in SEC Filings? Yahoo’s Not Saying.
• Yahoo’s Response on CEO’s Computer Science ResumeGate: “Inadvertent Error”
• Dan Loeb Alleges “Discrepancies” on Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson’s Resume Related to Computer Science Degree

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120503/yahoos-board-will-review-resume-discrepancy-of-ceo/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120503/how-did-phantom-cs-degree-get-on-ceos-bio-in-sec-filings-yahoos-not-saying/ http://allthingsd.com/20120503/how-did-phantom-cs-degree-get-on-ceos-bio-in-sec-filings-yahoos-not-saying/#comments Thu, 03 May 2012 23:08:24 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=203523

Back in early 2008 when Scott Thompson got the job as president of eBay’s PayPal, the regulatory filing accurately listed his educational pedigree:

“Mr. Thompson holds a B.S. degree in Accounting from Stonehill College.”

The eBay filings over the next several years — until he left the online commerce giant for a much bigger job as CEO of Yahoo in January of this year — remained consistent.

But, curiously, Thompson’s bio on eBay’s Web site added an additional degree to his curriculum vitae for more than a half-dozen years, different from its Securities and Exchange Commission documents:

“Scott received a bachelor’s in accounting and computer science from Stonehill College.”

As it turned out, according to the Boston-area school, he had not gotten a computer science degree at all and graduated with the Bachelor’s of Science in Business Administration (Accounting).

An eBay spokesman I called today had no explanation for the discrepancy, except to note that its legal filings were correct and that it was an error due to the lack of cross-checking the Web bio, which was apparently posted by Thompson’s staff at the time.

Also without explanation — and perhaps more seriously — is that the false computer science degree claim somehow then made it into Yahoo’s SEC filings, as well as his Web site bio, when Thompson took the helm. (The inaccurate line about his schooling is in its latest filing and all others.)

Without providing further explanation of how it got there, Yahoo today called the mistake an “inadvertent error” and said it had no bearing on his ability to lead the Silicon Valley Internet giant.

But the long troubled company might be speaking too soon, given that the revelation was uncovered this morning by activist shareholder Dan Loeb of Third Point. Loeb has called into question the vetting process that Yahoo’s directors did to hire Thompson, as part of a proxy fight he is waging to gain several board seats.

And, while such an allegation is normal for an increasingly nasty battle, Loeb has hit his mark with deadly accuracy this time, putting into question both Thompson’s credibility and Yahoo’s obvious botching in its vetting of him.

“If there is a good explanation for the apparent discrepancies regarding the academic records of Mr. Thompson and Ms. Hart, we are confident that it will be provided promptly,” wrote Loeb in a letter to Yahoo’s board today. “However, in the event that there is no good explanation, we expect the Board to take immediate action.”

The Ms. Hart that Loeb was referring to is Patti Hart, the board member who ran Yahoo’s process for hiring a new CEO after it fired Carol Bartz — who does have a CS degree — last year. (In his letter today, Loeb also correctly called into question how she portrayed her own college degree in a more impressive fashion than was accurate.)

The search for a new Yahoo CEO was conducted by headhunter Heidrick & Struggles, which did not have Thompson on its list of candidates, since it had placed him at eBay many years before.

In fact, according to numerous sources, without involvement by Heidrick, it was Thompson who cold-emailed key Yahoo board members, nominating himself for the CEO job. He was quickly brought in for interviews and, presumably, a thorough vetting.

Despite that and despite the fact that eBay’s SEC filings did not list a computer science degree, Hart or others seem to have totally missed the discrepancies and it was added to Thompson’s official Yahoo bio and legal filings.

It’s not clear what happens next or if there are any legal implications, beyond a needed correction by Yahoo with the SEC — which already took the entire line about Thompson’s education off his Web bio today.

Yahoo’s not talking either, with its spokesperson declining to provide any explanation for its lapse or who had maintained that Thompson had that degree when he did not.

It’s essentially a mistakes-were-made-let’s-move-on defense.

I think not, for my part, and a number of prominent Silicon Valley people I spoke to today agreed that these issues tend to spin out of control.

“This is going to get very messy, very quickly,” said one person in a common sentiment I heard.

Maybe, and it’s not clear if the company has to release any details of how this occurred or if its board needs to investigate the situation.

In addition, Thompson himself is probably not at risk unless it can be definitely proved he was the one who misrepresented having the degree in the first place. He can simply say he had no idea who added it to the eBay Web site and that he did not notice it there on on the Yahoo Web site and SEC filings.

While that makes him look careless, how big a deal it becomes with shareholders, as well as Yahoo employees, is also an unknown. While a computer science degree is not a requirement for a CEO of a tech company — both Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft’s Bill Gates dropped out of college and did pretty well in computer science anyway — tech resume padding, even inadvertent, is not a characteristic that is going endear Thompson to anyone.

Plus, it just handed Loeb a very potent weapon in his fight against Yahoo, the very day after the company said the hedge fund manager’s expertise was not “relevant” to gaining a board seat.

One thing’s for sure: Loeb is most certainly very good at vetting.

RELATED POSTS:

• Yahoo’s Parting With Thompson Will Be for “Cause” (a.k.a. CSLie)
• Ross Levinsohn’s Yahoo Plan: Back to the Future
• Here’s New Yahoo CEO’s First Note to Troops! (The Leaking-Internal-Memos-to-ATD Policy Remains in Effect As Usual)
• Yahoo Officially Confirms ATD Report on CEO Changes and Proxy Settlement
• Meet the Man I Call “The Hair”: The Video Stylings of Yahoo’s Newest CEO Ross Levinsohn
• Will Thompson’s Ouster Mean a Yahoo-Facebook Patent Settlement Too?
• Exclusive: Yahoo’s Thompson Out; Levinsohn In; Board Settlement With Loeb Nears Completion
• Heidrick & Struggles Slaps Back at Thompson’s Yahoo in Blame Game Over ResuMess
• Is He In or Is He Out? Crunchtime for Scott Thompson at Yahoo.
• Not So Scott Free? Yahoo’s Other Big Shareholder — Cap Re — Leaning Toward Supporting Loeb Over Thompson ResuMess.
• Tech Nation’s Gunn Says She and Yahoo CEO Discussed Their CS Degrees Before 2009 Show (Video and Audio)
• Loeb Calls Again for Thompson Firing From Yahoo, as Former eBay Boss Supports Him
• Place Your Bets: Will Loeb Drop Another Bomb on Yahoo at Vegas Confab Later Today?
• Exclusive: Yahoo Director in Charge of Botched CEO Vetting to Step Down From Board
• CEO Says Sorry to Yahoos for Borked Bio “Distraction” — But Will Mea Culpa Work Without an Apology for Error? (Memo)
• Buffett Comments on Trust Issue in Yahoo CEO BioGate: “You’ve Got a Problem”
• Loeb Lobs Lawsuit, as Expected, at Yahoo’s Borked Bio Mess
• As Yahoo CEO Reaches Out to Top Staff, Board Meets to Weigh “Options” (I.E., Deciding Who Gets to Take the Borked Bio Blame)
• Yahoo Should Expect Incoming Lawsuit Lobbed by Loeb Tomorrow on CEO Hiring
• They Shoot Yahoo CEOs, Don’t They? But Not Without a Really Smoking Gun and a Much Stronger Board.
• Yahoo’s Thompson Asks Employees to “Stay Focused” — Except Not on Him
• In 2009 Interview, Yahoo CEO Does Not Deny He Has a CS Degree, and Calls Himself an “Engineer” (Audio)
• Yahoo’s Board Will “Review” Resume Discrepancy of CEO
• How Did a Phantom CS Degree Get on CEO’s Bio in SEC Filings? Yahoo’s Not Saying.
• Yahoo’s Response on CEO’s Computer Science ResumeGate: “Inadvertent Error”
• Dan Loeb Alleges “Discrepancies” on Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson’s Resume Related to Computer Science Degree

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120503/how-did-phantom-cs-degree-get-on-ceos-bio-in-sec-filings-yahoos-not-saying/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120503/yahoos-response-on-computer-science-resumegate-inadvertent-error/ http://allthingsd.com/20120503/yahoos-response-on-computer-science-resumegate-inadvertent-error/#comments Thu, 03 May 2012 19:27:37 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=203351

A Yahoo spokesperson just confirmed as accurate allegations from an activist shareholder Dan Loeb of Third Point that its CEO Scott Thompson did not have a computer science degree from Stonehill College as claimed on his bio and also in regulatory filings.

He does not, a mistake that the Silicon Valley Internet giant is calling an “inadvertent error.”

Except this is a mistake that goes back more than a half-dozen years, as it is also on the Web site bio at eBay, where he served as president of its PayPal payments unit and its CTO before that.

(Update: Yahoo just removed the line about Thompson’s college degrees from his Web site bio entirely.)

While Yahoo sought to underplay the controversy, it could become a serious issue for Yahoo, both from a credibility and regulatory compliance issue.

It would also call into question — as Loeb does in the letter — the amount of vetting done by Yahoo on the CEO choice, which was conducted by board member Patti Hart.

It gets worse: Loeb also alleged that Hart changed her degree from Illinois State College from business administration to a loftier economics and marketing. And Yahoo admitted it was so, noting the director had a business administration degree, with a specialty in economics and marketing — whatever that means.

But, incompetent vetting by Hart aside, it is how and why Thompson changed his resume that will be at issue.

Here’s one fact that is true: Thompson only has an accounting degree from Stonehill College, near Boston, which he attended from 1975 to 1979.

(Second Update: Stonehill also confirmed that Thompson’s degree was only a Bachelor’s of Science in Business Administration (Accounting).)

Here is, in fact, a screenshot of an alumni newsletter when Thompson got the job at Yahoo earlier this year:

Despite the mistake, however it was made and which presumably serves to burnish Thompson’s tech cred, Yahoo said in a statement that it does not diminish his qualifications to lead the tech company.

Said the statement in full:

“Scott Thompson’s degree at Stonehill College was in bachelor science in accounting. There was an inadvertent error that stated Mr. Thompson also holds a degree in computer science. This, in no way, alters that fact that Mr. Thompson is a highly qualified executive with a successful track record leading large consumer technology companies. Under Mr. Thompson’s leadership, Yahoo! is moving forward to grow the company and drive shareholder value.”

Here’s the definition of inadvertent, for those who don’t know:

1. failing to act carefully or considerately; inattentive
2. resulting from heedless action; unintentional inadvertently

I’d say it’s going to turn out to be a lot more than that, but we’ll see what the board of Yahoo and, ultimately, shareholders, have to say.

(And, ironically, just yesterday Yahoo wrote a letter to shareholders claiming that Loeb did not have “relevant” expertise to be on its board. Turns out, he’s definitely pretty good at vetting.)

RELATED POSTS:

• Yahoo’s Parting With Thompson Will Be for “Cause” (a.k.a. CSLie)
• Ross Levinsohn’s Yahoo Plan: Back to the Future
• Here’s New Yahoo CEO’s First Note to Troops! (The Leaking-Internal-Memos-to-ATD Policy Remains in Effect As Usual)
• Yahoo Officially Confirms ATD Report on CEO Changes and Proxy Settlement
• Meet the Man I Call “The Hair”: The Video Stylings of Yahoo’s Newest CEO Ross Levinsohn
• Will Thompson’s Ouster Mean a Yahoo-Facebook Patent Settlement Too?
• Exclusive: Yahoo’s Thompson Out; Levinsohn In; Board Settlement With Loeb Nears Completion
• Heidrick & Struggles Slaps Back at Thompson’s Yahoo in Blame Game Over ResuMess
• Is He In or Is He Out? Crunchtime for Scott Thompson at Yahoo.
• Not So Scott Free? Yahoo’s Other Big Shareholder — Cap Re — Leaning Toward Supporting Loeb Over Thompson ResuMess.
• Tech Nation’s Gunn Says She and Yahoo CEO Discussed Their CS Degrees Before 2009 Show (Video and Audio)
• Loeb Calls Again for Thompson Firing From Yahoo, as Former eBay Boss Supports Him
• Place Your Bets: Will Loeb Drop Another Bomb on Yahoo at Vegas Confab Later Today?
• Exclusive: Yahoo Director in Charge of Botched CEO Vetting to Step Down From Board
• CEO Says Sorry to Yahoos for Borked Bio “Distraction” — But Will Mea Culpa Work Without an Apology for Error? (Memo)
• Buffett Comments on Trust Issue in Yahoo CEO BioGate: “You’ve Got a Problem”
• Loeb Lobs Lawsuit, as Expected, at Yahoo’s Borked Bio Mess
• As Yahoo CEO Reaches Out to Top Staff, Board Meets to Weigh “Options” (I.E., Deciding Who Gets to Take the Borked Bio Blame)
• Yahoo Should Expect Incoming Lawsuit Lobbed by Loeb Tomorrow on CEO Hiring
• They Shoot Yahoo CEOs, Don’t They? But Not Without a Really Smoking Gun and a Much Stronger Board.
• Yahoo’s Thompson Asks Employees to “Stay Focused” — Except Not on Him
• In 2009 Interview, Yahoo CEO Does Not Deny He Has a CS Degree, and Calls Himself an “Engineer” (Audio)
• Yahoo’s Board Will “Review” Resume Discrepancy of CEO
• How Did a Phantom CS Degree Get on CEO’s Bio in SEC Filings? Yahoo’s Not Saying.
• Yahoo’s Response on CEO’s Computer Science ResumeGate: “Inadvertent Error”
• Dan Loeb Alleges “Discrepancies” on Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson’s Resume Related to Computer Science Degree

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120503/yahoos-response-on-computer-science-resumegate-inadvertent-error/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120503/dan-loeb-alleges-discrepancies-on-yahoo-ceo-scott-thompsons-resume-related-to-computer-science-degree/ http://allthingsd.com/20120503/dan-loeb-alleges-discrepancies-on-yahoo-ceo-scott-thompsons-resume-related-to-computer-science-degree/#comments Thu, 03 May 2012 18:53:08 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=203301

The gloves are now really off in the proxy battle for Yahoo.

In a letter to Yahoo’s board, activist shareholder Dan Loeb of Third Point is alleging that the company’s new CEO Scott Thompson has inaccurately added a computer science degree to his resume.

(Update: Yahoo confirmed that Loeb is correct about Thompson not having such a degree and called it an “inadvertent error.”)

Thompson went to Stonehill College, near Boston, from 1975 to 1979, according to his LinkedIn profile, but it does not specify his degree.

(Second Update: Stonehill College also confirms that Thompson only graduated with a Bachelor’s of Science in Business Administration (Accounting).)

And older bios, such as one from his director bio for F5 and one from Forbes, as well as a Stone Hill College alumni newsletter, note that he graduated only with a Bachelor’s of Science in accounting.

But in official bios from his job at eBay as head of its PayPal payments division, as well as on the current Yahoo one, a degree in computer science also appears, along with the accounting degree.

“Scott received a bachelor’s in accounting and computer science from Stonehill College,” read the Yahoo and eBay bios. It is also in Yahoo’s regulatory filings.

According to Loeb’s letter:

Upon recognizing this discrepancy, Third Point initially assumed that the documents we had reviewed were incorrect and the representations in Yahoo!’s public filings were accurate. However, we were then informed by Stonehill College that Mr. Thompson did indeed graduate with a degree in accounting only. Furthermore, Stonehill College informed us that it did not begin awarding computer science degrees until 1983 — four years after Mr. Thompson graduated. We inquired whether Mr. Thompson had taken a large number of computer science courses, perhaps allowing him to justify to himself that he had “earned” such a degree. Instead, we learned that during Mr. Thompson’s tenure at Stonehill only one such course was even offered — Intro to Computer Science. Presumably, Mr. Thompson took that course.

I am awaiting a call back from Stonehill about Thompson’s degree, which the college is checking now. And I called Yahoo for comment and also am waiting for that, too.

If Loeb’s allegations are true and Thompson burnished his resume to add educational expertise to lend him more tech credibility, it could become a serious issue for Yahoo.

It would also call into question — as Loeb does in the letter — the amount of vetting done by Yahoo on the CEO choice, which was conducted by board member Patti Hart.

It gets worse: Loeb is also alleging that Hart changed her degree from Illinois State College from business administration to a loftier economics and marketing.

(Update: Loeb is correct. Yahoo said Hart has a degree in business administration, with a specialty in economics and marketing — although I am not sure what that means exactly.)

But Thompson’s educational pedigree is the main issue here, of course, and Loeb is calling for his head if explanations are not provided.

“If Mr. Thompson embellished his academic credentials we think that it 1) undermines his credibility as a technology expert and 2) reflects poorly on the character of the CEO who has been tasked with leading Yahoo! at this critical juncture. Now more than ever Yahoo! investors need a trustworthy CEO,” said Loeb in the letter.

But read it for yourself — here is the full letter from Loeb:

Third Point Letter to Board May 3 Release

RELATED POSTS:

• Yahoo’s Parting With Thompson Will Be for “Cause” (a.k.a. CSLie)
• Ross Levinsohn’s Yahoo Plan: Back to the Future
• Here’s New Yahoo CEO’s First Note to Troops! (The Leaking-Internal-Memos-to-ATD Policy Remains in Effect As Usual)
• Yahoo Officially Confirms ATD Report on CEO Changes and Proxy Settlement
• Meet the Man I Call “The Hair”: The Video Stylings of Yahoo’s Newest CEO Ross Levinsohn
• Will Thompson’s Ouster Mean a Yahoo-Facebook Patent Settlement Too?
• Exclusive: Yahoo’s Thompson Out; Levinsohn In; Board Settlement With Loeb Nears Completion
• Heidrick & Struggles Slaps Back at Thompson’s Yahoo in Blame Game Over ResuMess
• Is He In or Is He Out? Crunchtime for Scott Thompson at Yahoo.
• Not So Scott Free? Yahoo’s Other Big Shareholder — Cap Re — Leaning Toward Supporting Loeb Over Thompson ResuMess.
• Tech Nation’s Gunn Says She and Yahoo CEO Discussed Their CS Degrees Before 2009 Show (Video and Audio)
• Loeb Calls Again for Thompson Firing From Yahoo, as Former eBay Boss Supports Him
• Place Your Bets: Will Loeb Drop Another Bomb on Yahoo at Vegas Confab Later Today?
• Exclusive: Yahoo Director in Charge of Botched CEO Vetting to Step Down From Board
• CEO Says Sorry to Yahoos for Borked Bio “Distraction” — But Will Mea Culpa Work Without an Apology for Error? (Memo)
• Buffett Comments on Trust Issue in Yahoo CEO BioGate: “You’ve Got a Problem”
• Loeb Lobs Lawsuit, as Expected, at Yahoo’s Borked Bio Mess
• As Yahoo CEO Reaches Out to Top Staff, Board Meets to Weigh “Options” (I.E., Deciding Who Gets to Take the Borked Bio Blame)
• Yahoo Should Expect Incoming Lawsuit Lobbed by Loeb Tomorrow on CEO Hiring
• They Shoot Yahoo CEOs, Don’t They? But Not Without a Really Smoking Gun and a Much Stronger Board.
• Yahoo’s Thompson Asks Employees to “Stay Focused” — Except Not on Him
• In 2009 Interview, Yahoo CEO Does Not Deny He Has a CS Degree, and Calls Himself an “Engineer” (Audio)
• Yahoo’s Board Will “Review” Resume Discrepancy of CEO
• How Did a Phantom CS Degree Get on CEO’s Bio in SEC Filings? Yahoo’s Not Saying.
• Yahoo’s Response on CEO’s Computer Science ResumeGate: “Inadvertent Error”
• Dan Loeb Alleges “Discrepancies” on Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson’s Resume Related to Computer Science Degree

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