Poor Meg Whitman can't catch a break. Remember that analyst briefing Hewlett-Packard held in October, where Whitman tried to air all of the company's bad news at once? Well, it looks like she missed some. And there's no telling where it stops.

Yesterday, HP announced that an internal investigation had found "accounting improprieties, misrepresentations and disclosure failures" in the financial records of Autonomy, the unstructured "big data" analysis software firm acquired by HP last year, after being tipped off by "a senior member of Autonomy's leadership team." The disclosure came as HP took a non-cash accounting charge of $8.8 billion—over $5 billion of it related directly to Autonomy's alleged book-cooking.

In other words, HP is saying that Autonomy, which it bought in August of 2011 for about $10.2 billion, is worth less than half that. And HP's executives are pinning the blame on Autonomy's founder and former CEO Mike Lynch (who was fired in May because of Autonomy's plummeting revenue), other members of Autonomy's management, and the accounting firm Deloitte—which performed the audit of Autonomy's books before the merger.

HP charges that Autonomy employees willfully committed fraud in an effort to raise the company's acquisition value by:

Booking hardware sales as software license sales to inflate the apparent size of the software business—accounting for about 15 percent of the company's claimed software revenue

Including license transactions to resellers as revenue before product was sold to end-users

Booking long-term software-as-a-service deals, where Autonomy hosted software for customers, as all-at-once revenue, before money was in hand

HP has gone to the authorities with the charges, contacting the UK's Serious Fraud Office and the US Securities and Exchange Commission. With the lawsuits that are sure to follow, it appears that HP's lawyers, still busy with the company's lawsuit against Oracle, are assured of continued job security. Job security for rank-and-file Autonomy employees doesn't appear to be threatened at the moment, either. "We remain 100 percent committed to Autonomy and its industry-leading technology," HP's announcement proclaimed.

The ghost of turkeys past

The remaining $3 billion or so of HP's accounting writedown, the company said, is "linked to the recent trading value of HP stock and headwinds against anticipated synergies and marketplace performance"—in other words, because of the rest of the company's bad news this quarter, including the indirect effect of the Autonomy mess.

Much of the blame for this can be convincingly pinned on the strategic direction HP took under former CEO Leo Apotheker. HP bought Autonomy as part of its effort to become more like IBM, moving away from the PC business and toward a more software and consulting-driven business model (a business that Apotheker, who had come from enterprise software vendor SAP, knew well).

The $8.8 billion writedown came as the company released its fourth-quarter and annual financial numbers, and it accounts for much of the company's $12.7 billion loss for the year. But even before taking the charge, the company's revenues were down $2 billion in the fourth quarter relative to the fourth quarter of 2011, and they were down $6.8 billion for the year—losses Whitman had earlier attributed to the company's structural and strategic problems brought on by previous management (a not-so subtle passing of blame to Apotheker).

On the bright side, HP's cash flow for the year moved in a positive direction to $4.1 billion—up 69 percent from 2011. So it's possible that the company will emerge from this latest rough spot in better shape—as long as no more skeletons hide in the company's fiscal closets.