The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on Friday reported that the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has begun a probe of ExxonMobil after an employee alleged that the oil company overvalued one of its key assets in the Permian Basin.
Citing a complaint it said it has seen, the WSJ said that several persons involved in valuing a key asset in the Permian – the highest producing US oil field – alleged that during an internal assessment in 2019 employees were forced to use unrealistic assumptions about how quickly the company could drill oil wells there so as to arrive at a higher value.
The WSJ said that the SEC began probing the matter after receiving the complaint. An SEC spokesman declined a comment to the WSJ.