The charging last week of three former Hewlett-Packard (HP) employees in Germany reminded me of some of the interesting underlying facts of the case. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) has reported that at least one witness has said that the transactions in question were internally approved by HP through its then existing, contract approval process. Mr. Dieter Brunner, a contract employee who was working as an accountant on the group that approved the transaction, said in an interview that he was surprised when, as a temporary employee of HP, he first saw an invoice from an agent in 2004. “It didn’t make sense,” because there was no apparent reason for HP to pay such big sums to accounts controlled by small-businesses, Mr. Brunner said. He then proceeded to say he processed the transactions anyway because he was the most junior employee handling the file, “I assumed the deal was OK, because senior officials also signed off on the paperwork”.