Re: Trade deal - test for the UK government
Its not that hard to fool auditors, especially since I'm sure these were sent in at the last moment to do a rush job - a company with a valuation running to 10 digits and above *before* the decimal point would take many months to fully audit, and HPE was in a hurry.
All these "auditors" did, most likely, is just make sure the total over here was the same as over there and double check some arithmetic. There was no digging into the assumptions or validating the basic numbers - they were just checking the decorations.
A certain hard drive manufacturer in the US, which no longer exists, was at one point claiming a value many times its actual worth, with large "orders" of stuff actually sent *to* itself, consisting of empty boxes. But having those "hard drives in shipment" let them claim way more inventory than they really had. After a while, building bricks were placed in the boxes so they had weight, thus creating truly bricked hard drives, without the drives.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
