It's a story that might have gotten more attention a few years ago, but now Wall Street has become somewhat complacent about accounting/governance issues.

Shares of Dell Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) actually closed up after the company disclosed that it would be restating results for 2003 to Q1 2007 because of various accounting issues, manipulation of numbers at the request of senior executives to meet financial targets.

Some analysts don't care. According to MarketWatch, "Eric Ross, an analyst with ThinkEquity Partners, called the restatement 'meaningless' due to the amounts involved in the restatement periods."

In a way he's right. If all that investors should care about is ROE, EBITDA, and EPS, it doesn't matter. It's not material. But when investing for the long term, we're putting a lot of faith in management, and the fact that company executives were committing fraud ("seeking adjustments so that quarterly performance objectives could be met" = fraud) over a period of four years should hardly be construed as "meaningless."

Tyco International Ltd. (NYSE: TYC) has finally settled multiple lawsuits that accused the company of inflating earnings.

It only had to pay $2.98 billion for the privilege. The bad behavior, which overstated Tyco's income by more than $5 billion during the tenure of former Chief Executive Officer L. Dennis Kozlowski, can now be pushed into the past. That will allow the company to go forward with it plan to split into three companies.

Under the plan to break up the company, its healthcare and electronics divisions will become new public companies. Tyco will keep the company's fire, security and engineered products divisions. One of the news companies will be called Tyco Electronics and the other will take on the name Covidien.

Shareholders seem to think that having the company in three pieces is a good idea. The stock price is up about 18% over the last year and trades near a 52-week high at $32.19.

In the last quarter, Tyco's revenue rose 7% to just over $10 billion. Net was off from $895 million in the quarter a year ago to $835 million. Costs of the breakup drove up expenses.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.