During the fourth quarter of 2021, a Tesla employee and a tech industry researcher filed a whistleblower complaint with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, voicing concerns that Elon Musk’s automaker may have repeatedly broken the law, harming shareholders, employees, and customers.
The complaint made a number of claims about Tesla’s finances and business practises, including that it misclassified repairs for years and had poor control over internal systems used to gather data for financial and other company disclosures to shareholders.
According to documents analysed by CNBC, the SEC assigned one employee to examine one area of the complaint in January 2022 pertaining to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ work for Tesla. A few months later, the ticket was closed.
They claim that despite offering to review about 18,000 files, including internal Tesla emails, spreadsheets, screenshots, recordings, and images in addition to public records they gathered to support their claims, agency staff has never spoken with the people who filed the complaint. They also claim that staff never accepted their offer to review those files.
Source (CNBC)
