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Mike Lynch was celebrating acquittal before violent storm hit

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Mike Lynch, the British tech tycoon missing after his luxury yacht sank off the coast of Sicily, had only recently fended off a U.S. criminal fraud case over the sale of his software company to Hewlett Packard Co.

Lynch, 59, and his wife were aboard the yacht, named Bayesian after a British mathematician, with a small group of his financial and legal advisers when the violent storm hit. They were celebrating Lynch’s tumultuous acquittal just over two months earlier, when a San Francisco jury found him not guilty of charges that he duped HP into overpaying for his software firm, Autonomy Corp. 

Hailed at times as “Britain’s Bill Gates,” Lynch has been seeking to restore his reputation as one of Europe’s most successful entrepreneurs. For years, he’d argued that he had been scapegoated over the acquisition. HP paid $11 billion for Autonomy in 2011, only to write down $8.8 billion of the purchase price a year later.

Mike Lynch
Mike Lynch

Simon Dawson/Bloomberg

But even after his acquittal on criminal charges, Lynch was still fighting the Silicon Valley giant in a civil case in London, where a British judge held him responsible for creating the illusion of a company much larger and more successful than it really was. 

Autonomy’s success — its software could extract useful information from unstructured sources including phone calls, emails and video — made Lynch one of the best-known British technology executives. He was named Entrepreneur of the Year by the Confederation of British Industry in 1999. In 2000, Time magazine named him one of the 25 most influential technology leaders in Europe. 

Advised prime ministers

He was awarded an Order of the British Empire for services to enterprise in 2006. The same year, he was appointed as non-executive director to the board of the British Broadcasting Corp., the world’s biggest public broadcaster. He advised two British prime ministers, David Cameron and Theresa May. 

Lynch made at least $500 million from the HP deal. He then set up venture capital firm Invoke Capital, founding a series of tech companies run by former employees. The most successful was Darktrace Plc, a cybersecurity business that uses AI to detect suspicious activity in a company’s IT network. Forbes magazine estimated his net worth to be $1 billion in 2015, the sole year he was named to its list of global billionaires. 

HP, along with U.S. prosecutors, alleged that Lynch and Autonomy’s former finance chief used accounting tricks to inflate the company’s revenue ahead of the 2011 sale.

The San Francisco trial placed huge pressures on the tech founder, who was forced to wear an ankle monitor and confined to 24-hour supervision by private security guards he had to pay for. On the stand, Lynch claimed ignorance of some of the wrongdoing attributed to him, saying he delegated key decisions to underlings.

Autonomy “wasn’t perfect,” Lynch testified at the trial. “The reality of life is that it’s nuanced and it’s messy and sometimes you do your best to get through it. And companies are just like that.” When the verdict came, following two days of deliberations, Lynch hugged his lawyer and wiped his eyes.

HP’s acquisition of the company was initially seen as a validation of UK technology and the Cambridge “Silicon Fen” tech cluster where Autonomy was based. But in 2012, HP publicly accused Autonomy and its executives of accounting failures. The lawsuit followed. Lynch chose to fight the civil trial with HP in London before facing a US jury in the hope that a ruling on home soil would help his case. 

In 20 days of testimony in the UK civil case, he served up a litany of anecdotes aiming to illustrate that HP was riven with executive turmoil and infighting as the company replaced its chief executive officer and pivoted on strategy shortly after the disastrous Autonomy deal.

He largely succeeded. Documents showed HP executives turning on each other — with HP CEO Meg Whitman, the onetime candidate for governor of California and current US ambassador to Kenya, saying she’d be prepared to throw her predecessor Leo Apotheker “under the bus in a tit for tat.” Taking over just as HP closed the Autonomy deal, Whitman sought to focus the firm back on its core PC unit to better manage the sprawling business.

But after one of the longest and most expensive trials in British history, Judge Robert Hildyard ruled in 2022 that Lynch and Autonomy had fraudulently boosted the value of the company. “One of the tragedies of the case is clear: an innovative and ground-breaking product, its architect and the company will probably always be associated with fraud,” the judge said in the ruling.

Damages pending

The judge was still to decide the damages Lynch would have to pay. HP was seeking $4 billion from him and his finance chief, but the judge had cautioned that it was likely to get substantially less than that.

Those looming penalties from the civil suit did not dent Lynch’s ambitions once he was released from house arrest in the U.S.

“I am looking forward to returning to the U.K. and getting back to what I love most: my family and innovating in my field,” Lynch said in a statement after the California jury cleared him of criminal wrongdoing.

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House passes tax administration bills

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The House unanimously passed four bipartisan bills Tuesday concerning taxes and the Internal Revenue Service that were all endorsed this week by the American Institute of CPAs, and passed two others as well.

  • H.R. 1152, the Electronic Filing and Payment Fairness Act, sponsored by Rep. Darin LaHood, R-Illinois, Suzan Delbene, D-Washington, Randy Feenstra, R-Iowa, Brad Schneider, D-Illinois, Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pennsylvania and Jimmy Panetta, D-California. The bill would apply the “mailbox rule” to electronically submitted tax returns and payments to allow the IRS to record payments and documents submitted to the IRS electronically on the day the payments or documents are submitted instead of when they are received or reviewed at a later date. The AICPA believes this would offer clarity and simplification to the payment and document submission process while protecting taxpayers from undue penalties.
  • H.R. 998, the Internal Revenue Service Math and Taxpayer Help Act, sponsored by Rep. Randy Feenstra, R-Iowa, and Brad Schneider, D-Illinois, which would require notices describing a mathematical or clerical error to be made in plain language, and require the Treasury to provide additional procedures for requesting an abatement of a math or clerical error adjustment, including by telephone or in person, among other provisions.
  • H.R. 517, the Filing Relief for Natural Disasters Act, sponsored by Rep. David Kustoff, R-Tennessee, and Judy Chu, D-California. The process of receiving tax relief from the IRS following a natural disaster typically must follow a federal disaster declaration, which can often come weeks after a state disaster declaration. The bill would provide the IRS with authority to grant tax relief once the governor of a state declares either a disaster or a state of emergency and expand the mandatory federal filing extension under Section 7508(d) of the Tax Code from 60 days to 120 days, providing taxpayers with more time to file tax returns after a disaster.
  • H.R. 1491, the Disaster related Extension of Deadlines Act, sponsored by Rep. Gregory Murphy, R-North Carolina, and Jimmy Panetta, D-California, would extend the amount of time disaster victims would have to file for a tax refund or credit (i.e., the lookback period) by the amount of time afforded pursuant to a disaster relief postponement period for taxpayers affected by major disasters. This legislative solution would place taxpayers on equal footing as taxpayers not impacted by major disasters and would afford greater clarity and certainty to taxpayers and tax practitioners regarding this lookback period.

“The AICPA has long supported these proposals and will continue to work to advance comprehensive legislation that enhances IRS operations and improves the taxpayer experience,” said Melanie Lauridsen, vice president of tax policy and advocacy for the AICPA, in a statement Tuesday. “We are pleased to work closely with each of these Representatives on common-sense reforms that will benefit taxpayers, tax practitioners and tax administration and we’re encouraged by their passage in the House. We look forward to continuing to work with Congress to improve the taxpayer experience.”

The bills were also included in a recent Senate discussion draft aimed at improving tax administration at the IRS that are strongly supported by the AICPA.

The House also passed two other tax-related bills Tuesday that weren’t endorsed in the recent AICPA letter. 

  • H.R. 1155, Recovery of Stolen Checks Act, sponsored by Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, R-New York, would require the IRS to create a process for taxpayers to request a replacement via direct deposit for a stolen paper check. If a check is determined to be stolen or lost, and not cashed, a taxpayer will receive a replacement check once the original check is cancelled, but many taxpayers are having their replacement checks stolen as well. Taxpayers who have a check stolen are then unable to request that the replacement check be sent via direct deposit. The bill would require the Treasury to establish processes and procedures under which taxpayers, who are otherwise eligible to receive an amount by paper check in replacement of a lost or stolen paper check, may elect to receive such amount by direct deposit.
  • H.R. 997, National Taxpayer Advocate Enhancement Act, sponsored by Rep. Randy Feenstra, R-Iowa, would prevent IRS interference with National Taxpayer Advocate personnel by granting the NTA responsibility for its attorneys. In advocating for taxpayer rights, the National Taxpayer Advocate often requires independent legal advice. But currently, the staff members hired by the National Taxpayer Advocate are accountable to internal IRS counsel, not the Taxpayer Advocate, creating a potential conflict of interest to the detriment of taxpayers. The bill would authorize the National Taxpayer Advocate to hire attorneys who report directly to her, helping establish independence from the IRS. 

House  Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith, R-Missouri, applauded the bipartisan House passage of the various bills, which had been unanimously passed by the committee.

“President Trump was elected on the promise of finally making the government work better for working people,” Smith said in a statement Tuesday. “This bipartisan legislation helps fulfill that mandate and makes improvements to tax administration that will make it easier for the American people to file their taxes. Those who are rebuilding after a natural disaster particularly need help filing taxes, which is why this set of bills lightens the load for taxpayers in communities struck by a hurricane, tornado or some other disaster. With Tax Day just a few days away, we must look for common-sense, bipartisan ways to make filing taxes less of a hassle.”

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Accounting

In the blogs: Many hats

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Teaching fraud; easement settlement offers; new blog on the block; and other highlights from our favorite tax bloggers.

Many hats

  • Taxbuzz (https://www.taxbuzz.com/blog): There’s sure an “I” in this “teamwork:” What to know about potential IRS and ICE collaboration.
  • Tax Vox (https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox): How IRS data would likely be unhelpful validating SNAP eligibility.
  • Yeo & Yeo (https://www.yeoandyeo.com/resources): How financial benchmarking (including involving taxes) can help business clients see trends, pinpoint areas for improvement and forecast future performance.
  • Integritas3 (https://www.integritas3.com/blog): One way to take a bite out of crime, according to this instructor blogger: Teach grad students how to detect, investigate and prevent financial fraud.
  • HBK (https://hbkcpa.com/insights/): Verifying income, fairly distributing property, digging the soon-to-be-ex’s assets out of the back of the dark, dark closet: How forensic accounting has emerged as a crucial element in divorces.

Standing out

Genuine intelligence

  • AICPA & CIMA Insights (https://www.aicpa-cima.com/blog): How artificial intelligence and other tech is “Reshaping Finance,” according to this podcast. Didem Un Ates, CEO of a U.K.-based company offering AI advisory services, tackles the topic.
  • Taxjar (https:/www.taxjar.com/resources/blog): How AI and automation can help even the knottiest sales tax obligations and problems.
  • Dean Dorton (https://deandorton.com/insights/): Favorite opening of the week: “The madness doesn’t just happen on college basketball courts — it also happens when your finance team is stuck using a legacy on-premises accounting system.”
  • Canopy (https://www.getcanopy.com/blog): Top client portals for accounting firms in 2025.
  • Mauled Again (https://mauledagain.blogspot.com/): Despite what Facebook claims, dependents have to be human.

New to us

  • Berkowitz Pollack Brant (https://www.bpbcpa.com/articles-press-releases/): This Florida firm offers a variety of services to many industries and has a good, wide-ranging blog. Recent topics include the BE-10, nexus and state and local tax obligations, IRS cuts and what to know about the possible bonus depreciation phase out. Welcome!

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Accounting

Is gen AI really a SOX gamechanger?

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By streamlining tasks such as risk assessment, control testing, and reporting, gen AI has the potential to increase efficiency across the entire SOX lifecycle.

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