The Securities and Exchange Commission reportedly sent 20 subpoenas to Microstrategy, auditor PricewaterhouseCoopers and several Microstrategy customers as part of a probe into auditor independence issues, according to The Wall Street Journal.

PWC denied the allegation. "To suggest our audit judgments somehow were influenced by other business considerations is wrong and unsupportable," PricewaterhouseCoopers spokesman Steven Silber reportedly told the newspaper.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the SEC is looking for links between the audit and requests the accounting firm may have made to Microstrategy for business referrals for consulting services.

PriceWaterhouse took over as auditor in July 1998 after merging with Coopers & Lybrand, MicroStrategy’s original auditor, the newspaper said. Before the merger, Price had been a MicroStrategy reseller.

The companies that were hit with subpoenas include Ameritrade Holding Corp. of Omaha, Neb.; Exchange Applications Inc. of Boston; NCR Corp. of Dayton, Ohio, and Primark Corp. of Waltham, Mass., the newspaper said.