NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch is much in the news these days.

His high-profile divorce case has turned ugly, and the revelation of all the undisclosed perks he continued to enjoy after leaving his post was much worse. Now the Securities and Exchange Commission has gotten into the act, GE said Monday, launching an inquiry into Welch's retirement package.

But all the hubbub over its former headman may be the least of GE's problems these days. Some investors have come to believe that, after years of steady growth, the company is about to falter.

For the past nine years, and probably again this year, GE (GE: up $0.79 to $28.69, Research, Estimates) has shown annual earnings growth of more than 10 percent. That steadiness has always been a conundrum to Wall Streeters, who can't figure out why GE's earnings are so much steadier than its peers. The assumption among many fund managers is that GE carefully manages its numbers to show more stable growth than it really has.

Smooth sailing GE's string of double digit years strikes some investors as improbably steady growth.   Earnings growth  1992  -2%  1993  21%  1994  14%  1995  13%  1996  11%  1997  13%  1998  14%  1999  15%  2000  19%  2001  11%   Source: Thomson Financial/First Call

"It's always been the case of something you suspect but have never been able to prove," said Brett Gallagher, head of U.S. equities at Julius Baer, whose fund has a small stake in GE. "Earnings seem improbably smooth when you look at the businesses of the company."

General Electric runs a smorgasbord of divisions, most of which seem like they should be incredibly susceptible to the economy. There's aircraft engines. There's power systems, which make the big turbines power plants use to generate electricity. There's NBC, which is dependent on the ad market. There are materials, technical products and services and appliances. There's GE Capital, its financial services arm, which accounts for nearly half of the company's revenue.

All of this adds up to a company whose earnings seem like they should be a lot more cyclical than GE's stated results are.

"I don't think there's any fraud there, but they're the king of creative and aggressive accounting," said Gallagher.

For its part, the company denies any attempt at earnings smoothing. "We manage our businesses, we don't manage earnings," said GE spokesman Gary Sheffer.

Regardless of whether GE is managing earnings or businesses, said Doug Kass, who runs the hedge fund Seabreeze Partners, it's hard to see how the company's earnings can continue to grow at the pace investors have gotten used to.

"The company faces the dual challenge of lower power system orders and a likely hiatus in jet production," said Kass, who is short GE's stock.

Together, the power and jet divisions accounted for about a quarter of GE's sales last year. The customers of both divisions have fallen on hard times. Earlier this year, for example, struggling independent power generator Calpine canceled $1.2 billion of turbine orders while delaying orders for others. On the aircraft side of things, US Air was forced into bankruptcy last month, while other carriers, most notably United Airlines (UAL: up $0.02 to $2.70, Research, Estimates), are suffering.

Moreover, Kass thinks that in the current environment, investors are showing a kind of skepticism toward GE's results that they didn't have through much of the 1990s. Back then it was enough that the company's bottom line kept growing, and if the company wanted to futz around to take the chop out of its results, so be it. After getting hammered by the likes of Enron, Worldcom and Tyco (TYC: Research, Estimates), anything that smacks of earnings management isn't going to fly.

"Facing these circumstance, GE won't be able to smooth anything," said Kass.

Still, said Kass, there's a difference between smoothing earnings -- a practice many companies use to some extent -- and "pulling a Tyco." Moreover, Welch continues to show enormous loyalty to his company, as demonstrated by his decision to cut back on the perks in his retirement package. Meanwhile, former Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski has been having lavish parties on his boat while waiting to go to court on charges he bilked his company out of at least $600 million.

Jeff Matthews, a hedge fund manager with Ram Partners who was short Enron and who continues to short Tyco, says that GE isn't flying the kinds of red flags these companies were flying before they went under.

"If you think GE was doing stuff like Tyco was, it wasn't," said Matthews, who has no position in the company. "It has real businesses and it manages them intensely. Would you rather they hadn't smoothed earnings and that they hadn't paid Welch a lot of money? Yeah, but I don't think it goes beyond that."

"Having said that," he added, "I doubt their earnings are going to hold up here."