5 Things About Corporate Investigations That Won't Change...

...as a result of the Hewlett-Packard pretexting scandal. Corporate investigations will be tweaked but not fundamentally altered.

By Sarah D. Scalet

January 01, 2007 — CSO —

Corporate investigations got a shock to the system last year.

On May 24, 2006, Hewlett-Packard's director of ethics sent out an internal memo stamped "Attorney-Client Privileged" that contained 12 pages' worth of detective work that would make any sleuth stand proud.

The memo, sent by Kevin T. Hunsaker to the company's CEO, general counsel and board of directors (and made public after a congressional hearing this past September), summarized the work that a group of HP internal investigators had done to determine an unnamed source for an article published by CNET on Jan. 23, 2006. The article contained details about a board meeting that HP chairwoman Patricia Dunn did not want made public. In painstaking detail, the investigative team laid out its findings.

Investigators had analyzed 10,000 news articles about HP published over a six-year time frame and indexed 1,000 articles written by the CNET reporter, Dawn Kawamoto. They had reviewed all the documentation that the board of directors had generated and relied upon for the meeting, as well as information about the meeting that was available publicly or to other HP employees. They had conducted extensive searches of HP's e-mail and Internet servers, and interviewed employees and board members in grueling detail about specific information that had been leaked to CNET and other publications over the years.

By page 13 of the memo, the case seemed pretty well sealed up. Investigators picked apart the language and facts for which Kawamoto cited an unnamed HP source, with the pool of possible sources dwindling down to one. In 2002, the "source" knew details about a licensing agreement with Intel in 1993; only two current board members would know those details. In 2003, the "source" spoke in glowing terms of HP's portfolio of patents; this was a favorite talking point of one board member. In 2006, the "source" used the term lectures, "an academic term, rarely used in the business environment"; only one board member had an academic background. In 2001, one board member had cultivated a relationship with Kawamoto, at former CEO Carly Fiorina's request, to promote HP's merger with Compaq. And so it went. In each instance, that board member was George W. Keyworth II.

The evidence was largely circumstantial, but this wasn't a criminal case. This was an internal investigation meant to help chairwoman Dunn and CEO Mark Hurd plug the leaks.

The trouble began when investigators sought to put the final nails in Keyworth's coffin. "...[A]t 5:25 p.m. PST on January 18, 2006...a call was made from Kawamoto's cell phone to Keyworth's home in Piedmont, California," reads a sentence on page 13. "The call lasted approximately one minute."

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