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A reader gives some juicy background on security company Symantec's tax debt — mostly carried over from Veritas, which it bought last year. A few years back, Veritas's CFO wasn't doing his job, but he was doing a low-level employee.

A few years ago, Veritas CFO Ken Lonchar (pronounced like 'Lawnchair') resigned in disgrace for not having the Stanford MBA he claimed on his resume.

People who really knew corporate dirt claimed it was timed to avoid him causing corporate trouble for a relationship with a low-level employee (since there are enough bona fide Stanford MBA's around to ask hard-to-fake-questions like 'Did you have Bulow for Finance?' and not be satisfied with any answer that does not include 'is he the guy who can do logs in his head?').

More memories of Veritas after the jump.

Symantec Hit With Big Tax Bills [L.A. Times]

Ken came to Veritas via a merger with another firm and wasn't subject to background checks—but there weren't any in place, at least for ordinary engineers, when I was hired, pre-ouster, in early 2002. That changed right afterwards.

In the post-Ken clean-up there were endless reviews or everything that happened during Ken's watch, late 10K filings for almost all the intervals following (up to the SYMC merger), and bizarre financial reckonings (20 or so number crunchers camped out in a windowed first-floor conference room for months, and the sheer dullness of their tasks and dress code made me pity accountants everywhere.). So the disputed years have already been gone over pretty carefully—something else may indeed be going on.