HP Settles Kickback Case With DoJ

Hewlett-Packard said it has reached a settlement with the Department of Justice this week over a long-running case involving government contracts, though the PC maker denied it did anything illegal.

A report in the Financial Timessaid the case dates back to 2007 and involves complaints HP (NYSE: HPQ) overcharged the government on multiple federal contracts.

“HP has agreed to a settlement with the Department of Justice, without any admission of wrongdoing, in order to resolve the allegations in full,” the company said in a brief statement.

The company also said the settlement would have a negative impact on its third quarter fiscal earnings of approximately two cents a share. Since HP has over 2 billion shares outstanding, the settlement cost could reach as high as $50 million.

HP this week also said it had settled the Rille whistleblower case, which had sparked the DoJ’s investigation. The Rillecomplaint, filed in the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Arkansas in 2007 by Normal Rille and Neal Roberts, involved charges that HP, Sun Microsystems (now owned by Oracle), consulting firm Accenture and others provided kickbacks, including illegal rebates, to win government contracts.

The charges actually date as far back as the late 1990s, when the government said HP and others began submitting false claims for IT hardware and services on numerous government contracts.

The settlement announcement comes on the heels of a lawsuit the DoJ filed last week against Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL). In the Oracle case, the government charged the enterprise software giantwith defrauding the federal government on a massive software contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars between 1998 and 2006..

David Needle is the West Coast bureau chief at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.

RELATED NEWS AND ANALYSIS

• Ethics and Artificial Intelligence: Driving Greater Equality

  FEATURE |  By James Maguire,
  December 16, 2020

• AI vs. Machine Learning vs. Deep Learning

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  December 11, 2020

• Huawei’s AI Update: Things Are Moving Faster Than We Think

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  December 04, 2020

• Keeping Machine Learning Algorithms Honest in the ‘Ethics-First’ Era

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  November 18, 2020

• Key Trends in Chatbots and RPA

  FEATURE |  By Guest Author,
  November 10, 2020

• Top 10 AIOps Companies

  FEATURE |  By Samuel Greengard,
  November 05, 2020

• What is Text Analysis?

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  November 02, 2020

• How Intel’s Work With Autonomous Cars Could Redefine General Purpose AI

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 29, 2020

• Dell Technologies World: Weaving Together Human And Machine Interaction For AI And Robotics

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 23, 2020

• The Super Moderator, or How IBM Project Debater Could Save Social Media

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 16, 2020

• Top 10 Chatbot Platforms

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  October 07, 2020

• Finding a Career Path in AI

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  October 05, 2020

• CIOs Discuss the Promise of AI and Data Science

  FEATURE |  By Guest Author,
  September 25, 2020

• Microsoft Is Building An AI Product That Could Predict The Future

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 25, 2020

• Top 10 Machine Learning Companies 2021

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  September 22, 2020

• NVIDIA and ARM: Massively Changing The AI Landscape

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 18, 2020

• Continuous Intelligence: Expert Discussion [Video and Podcast]

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By James Maguire,
  September 14, 2020

• Artificial Intelligence: Governance and Ethics [Video]

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By James Maguire,
  September 13, 2020

• IBM Watson At The US Open: Showcasing The Power Of A Mature Enterprise-Class AI

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 11, 2020

• Artificial Intelligence: Perception vs. Reality

  FEATURE |  By James Maguire,
  September 09, 2020