US Navy shipbuilding contractor Austal hit with accounting fraud charges.

Three executives at Austal USA, a Navy shipbuilding contractor, have been indicted for allegedly orchestrating a multimillion-dollar accounting fraud scheme from around 2013 through at least July 2016. The trio allegedly sought to artificially reduce cost estimates for Navy shipbuilding projects by tens of millions of dollars, resulting in a false overstatement of the company’s reported earnings in public financial statements. The DOJ claimed that they did this in part to maintain and increase the share price of the company’s stock, and when the higher costs were eventually disclosed, the stock price fell significantly and Austal USA’s parent company, Austal Limited, wrote down more than $100 million.