Antivirus and security vendor McAfee is one o more than 100 U.S. companies (including Apple and Dell) to have been investigated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in regard to option backdating, a practice whereby stock options granted to executives and employees are backdated in a way which makes the grant most advantageous to the employees. There’s nothing illegal about backdating, per se, so long as its impact on a company’s overall financial status is fully disclosed. The problem is that many companies didn’t seem to get that, with the result that the value of backdated options was not accurately reflected on company balance sheets. And that is (potentially) accounting fraud.
