Dell said Thursday that it would pay $100 million to settle with the SEC over its accounting sins in 2001-2006. CEO Michael Dell will pay a separate $4 million for not talking straight about Intel.
The AP remarks that the fine isn’t that large but “the decision to charge a sitting chief executive of a major company and reach a seven-figure settlement with him is rare.”
The director of the SEC’s Enforcement Division Robert Khuzami issued a statement saying, “Accuracy and completeness are the touchstones of public company disclosure under the federal securities laws. Michael Dell and other senior Dell executives fell short of that standard repeatedly over many years, and today they are held accountable.”
The deal includes the payment of a $4 million civil penalty by former Dell CEO Kevin Rollins and a $3 million penalty by former CFO James Schneider as well as $83,096 in restitution and $38,640 in interest. Former regional VP of finance Nicholas Dunning will pay a $50,000 penalty.
Nobody of course admits to being guilty of anything. There is however a permanent injunction forbidding Dell to fiddle any more and it has to hire an independent consultant to spiff up its “disclosure processes, practices and controls.” Michael Dell has also been enjoined against repeats.
Dell employees jigged its numbers to meet expectations. In 2007 Dell restated four years worth of financial reports indicating that revenues had been overstated by $359 million and earnings by $92 million. The company also caught flak over the payments from Intel that it treated as revenue.
The SEC said Dell never explained how payments from Intel from 2002-2006 in exchange for not using AMD chips inflated its numbers and let it meet its earnings targets or how when the payments were cut when it finally started using AMD chips it never explained why its numbers dropped.
In the glory days Dell even asked Intel for bigger payments to make the quarter. By the time, it put AMD in its line Dell was getting 76% of its operating income from Intel.
The upticks that the Intel payments created were explained away as being due to cost-cutting, declining component costs or execution.
The company established a $100 million reserve last month.
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