While companies are free to engage in PR spin as much as they want when talking about the health and well-being of their corporate head, one of the few places that companies are forced to be honest is in their Security and Exchange Commission filings. Specifically, that means the company’s 10-K, or annual report.
As such, Bloomberg News is now reporting that the Feds are now reviewing Apple’s recent statements “to ensure investors weren’t misled.”
Now, to be fair, this development doesn’t mean that Apple has done anything wrong. In fact, it is very well possible that everything was halal, kosher, and totally above board. Still, though, given the recent financial meltdown where companies are collapsing left and right, every other word on the news is “bailout,” and a 70-year-old dude in Lower Manhattan managed to dupe global investors out of billions of dollars for decades, you can understand the need to take caution.
As Prof. John Dienhart, who holds the Frank Shrontz Chair for Professional Ethics at Seattle University, told Bloomberg: “The reason we’re talking about this is we’re not sure they’re being really honest with us,” he said. “What’s amping up our skepticism is all those other business failures in the general market.”
So let’s just hope for all of our sakes that Cupertino has played this one totally straight.