SiliconBeat

Those pesky regulators are at it again.

This time, their victim is West Marine (ticker:WMAR), the Watsonville-based maker of boating supplies. The company had already disclosed that it was restating several years worth of earnings thanks to some accounting, er, issues.

But in an 8-K filed on Thursday, West Marine said that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission began an informal inquiry back in August into that restatement. The company turned over a pile of documents to the SEC in October.

How bad could this be? West Marine admittedly has no idea. But it can say that it will be costly, and a royal pain in the rump:

“We expect the inquiry to affect our results of operations and, in particular, our selling, general and administrative expense line item as we incur significant costs to, among other things, respond to the staff’s requests. Such costs will be incurred on an ongoing basis as the staff conducts its informal inquiry. However, the outcome of this matter cannot be predicted at this time, and consequently, we cannot estimate the impact on subsequent quarters that the costs associated with this SEC informal inquiry will have on our results of operations.”