Jan. 30 (Bloomberg) -- Apple Inc.’s shifting disclosures about Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs’s health are forcing regulators into new legal territory, balancing investors’ right to information against a last bastion of executive privacy.

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s inquiry, reported by Bloomberg News last week, is likely to examine how Jobs’s diagnoses unfolded and why Apple announced Jan. 14 that he was taking a five-month medical leave, nine days after saying he needed “relatively simple” treatment for a nutritional ailment. The inquiry is being led by the SEC’s San Francisco office, a person familiar with the matter said.

Regulators have rarely pried into an executive’s health and may set a precedent if they bring a case.

“They’re delving into a sensitive area that’s very uncommon,” said Lisa Casey, an associate professor of securities law at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. After regulators forced companies to reveal more details on executive pay, “health is that last little area of privacy,” she said.

While securities law requires companies to disclose information material to their investors, it contains no explicit provision governing the health of executives. Companies have taken different approaches to releasing medical details about their leaders, even before Congress tightened corporate disclosure standards in a series of legislative moves.

Differing Disclosures

In 1987, weeks passed before MCI Communications Corp. disclosed that founder Bill McGowan had a heart transplant. By contrast, in June 2000, Berkshire Hathaway Inc. announced that Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Warren Buffett would need surgery to remove polyps and part of his colon.

Investigators in the Apple matter may seek a meeting with the company, internal documents, or a chronology of events leading up to Apple’s announcements this month, said former SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt. For both of Apple’s statements this month to be accurate, Jobs must have learned something new about his health, said Pitt, now CEO of consulting firm Kalorama Partners LLC in Washington, D.C.

“If he didn’t learn anything new in that intervening one- week period, then the question is why did he make the first statement, and why shouldn’t that statement be deemed false?” Pitt said.

The review doesn’t mean investigators have any evidence of wrongdoing, former SEC officials said.

‘Something Different’

“If he thought it was one thing, and found out it was something different, and corrected the information as soon as he found out, then there’s nothing wrong with that,” said Kathleen Bisaccia, a former SEC attorney in San Francisco and managing director at FTI Consulting Inc., a New York-based firm that advises companies on compliance and liability matters.

Steve Dowling, a spokesman for Cupertino, California-based Apple, and Michael Dicke, the SEC’s Associate Regional Director in San Francisco, declined to comment.

To have a case, the agency would have to show that Jobs or Apple executives knew the information provided to investors on Jan. 5 was false, or that the disclosures were reckless, said Jahan Raissi, former senior counsel at the SEC’s enforcement division and now a partner at Shartsis Friese in San Francisco.

“When you went out with the first announcement, is that all the information that you had, did you soft-pedal it, reveal only half of what you knew,” Raissi said.

Visibly Thinner

Investors have pressed for information on Jobs’s health since June, when he appeared gaunt at an Apple event to announce the iPhone 3G. The stock rose 4.2 percent in Nasdaq trading on Jan. 5 after Jobs said he had a hormone imbalance that was “robbing” his body of proteins. Apple fell as much as 6.2 percent on Jan. 15, the first trading day after Jobs announced the medical leave and said his health problems were “more complex” than originally thought. The stock closed down 2.3 percent that day.

Apple fell $2.87 to $90.13 at 4 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. It has lost 32 percent in the past year.

As part of the inquiry, SEC investigators may seek voluntary interviews with Apple officers, board members and Jobs himself, Raissi said.

Apple’s co-lead directors are Bill Campbell, a former Apple executive who currently serves as chairman of software maker Intuit Inc., and Genentech Inc. CEO Arthur Levinson.

Campbell, 68, is one of the two longest-serving members of Apple’s board, along with Jerome York, former chief financial officer for International Business Machines Corp. Campbell and York were appointed in August 1997 by Jobs, who replaced all but two of Apple’s directors after reclaiming leadership of the company two months before. Genentech’s Levinson, 58, has served on Apple’s board since 2000.

Campbell and York couldn’t be reached for comment, while Levinson declined to comment.

To contact the reporters on this story: Karen Gullo in San Francisco at kgullo@bloomberg.net; Connie Guglielmo in San Francisco at cguglielmo1@bloomberg.net; David Scheer in New York at dscheer@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: January 30, 2009 16:15 EST