Michael Dell still faces questions about accounting scandal

Dell, Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) CFO Don Carty sounded pretty confident last week that the accounting fraud inside the computer company, which resulted in a restatement of earnings from 2003 to 2006, was being cleaned up. But there are still many questions left unanswered including figuring out how much company founder Michael Dell knew about these shenanigans that occurred while his hand-picked buddy Kevin Rollins was chief executive.

Mr. Dell's role at the company he founded during the time of all these accounting problems will be under close scrutiny as the official SEC investigation continues, now that Dell's internal investigation has been completed. Did he know that revenue recognition was being shifted around in order for every quarter to meet (or beat) market expectations?

As Chairman, Mr. Dell probably had no idea what was going on and trusted Rollins' command of the day-to-day operations of the company. But in the last few months, this arrangement clearly wasn't working well.

Dell lost its CFO in the last eight months and the role was replaced. Then, Rollins was let go. Was this because of shoddy performance or financial shiftiness? Probably a little bit of both for Rollins. But with Dell still struggling to better compete against a resurgent Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) and others.

Financial scandals aside, Mr. Dell has quite a bit of work on his hands to convince Wall Street the company now is on the right path.