Murray was charged after Waltham, Massachusetts-based Kurzweil inflated its revenues in documents related to a 1993 public stock offering. She entered a guilty plea to charges of conspiracy and securities fraud, for which she could have been sentenced to as much as five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Murray received a lesser penalty because she testified as a government witness in the trial of former Kurzweil Director Bernard Bradstreet and others on related charges, the district attorney's office in Boston said.

According to the district attorney's office, Kurzweil inflated its revenues in 1993 by recognizing revenues before those sales met the auditing rules of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Under SEC rules, a company whose stock is publicly traded cannot recognize a sale until it has received a purchase order or sales quote signed by the customer and shipped the goods. The district attorney's office said Kurzweil routinely counted in its revenue figures sales which had not been finalized by the customer and in which the goods had not been shipped.

As a result, the prospectus for the company's initial public offering, and other documents filed with the SEC, contained false revenue information.

Kurzweil shareholders filed a class-action lawsuit against the company, Bradstreet, and founder Raymond Kurzweil in May, 1994, right after company management announced a review of revenue recognition policies and practices and the firm's accounts receivable.

(Grant Buckler/19960625/Press Contact: Joy Fallon or Anne-Marie Kent, US Attorney's Office, 617-223-9445)