Independent Outside Review Panel Needed at H-P
September 13, 2006
The clarification offered this morning that H-P’s Board Chair Patricia Dunn will not be resigning her seat on the Board of Directors at H-P but instead will merely step down as Chair – and that no other resignations or dismissals of anyone involved in the scandal have been sought or accepted – highlights the need for H-P’s board to immediately appoint an outside independent panel to review, with some speed, the actions of its board members and senior administrative officers and make recommendations about the additional steps that H-P must take to put the scandal behind it. As Dunn has indicated in previous interviews, it appears likely she may not have been the only board member or executive at H-P who was aware of the illegal theft of private information that belonged to others. The question now is: can H-P’s board and senior executives credibly investigate themselves? Given the mess they made of their last investigation turning to an outside panel that operates within the law and then making those findings public would be a smart and prudent step. Today’s Mercury News has a list of the questions that investigation should consider, which is similar to the one I offered a few days ago.
