Free Republic

South Carolina has collected about $1.8 billion in a bank account over the past decade and state and private accountants are still trying to figure out where the cash came from and where it was supposed to go. “It's like going into your bank and the bank president tells you we have a lot of money in our vault but we just don't know who it belongs to,” said Republican Sen. Larry Grooms, who is leading a Senate panel investigating the problem. It's the latest trouble with the state's books and the two agencies, typically led by elected officials, that...

Hewlett-Packard Co. said that a British company it bought for $9.7 billion last year lied about its finances, resulting in a massive write-down of the value of the business. CEO Meg Whitman avoided calling it a fraud, but said Tuesday that there were “serious accounting improprieties, disclosure failures and outright misrepresentations at Autonomy Corporation PLC.” HP is taking an $8.8 billion charge in its latest quarter largely to align the accounting value of Autonomy with its real value. The revelation is another blow for HP, which is struggling to reinvent itself as PC and printer sales shrink. Its shares hit...