The CEO and management abolished not only corporate culture, but many other rules and norms of a business. This is a case of how multimillion dollar corporation collapsed in two weeks. It took them sixteen years to build on of the strongest corporation in a wall street, and took them two weeks to go bankruptcy. Wall Street’s analysts could not understand how Enron always did better than the competitors. But it was Wall Street analysts also, who kept rising the stock prices of Enron.
He industrialized a body of executives that used accounting loopholes, special purpose entities, and poor financial reporting, to veil billions in debt from unsuccessful deals and projects (Bratton, 2003). Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow and other executives were able to deceive Enron's board of directors and audit committee regarding breach on accounting ethics as well as pressure Andersen to overlook the issues (McLean & Elkind 2003). By 1992, Enron was the largest merchant of natural gas in North America, and the gas trading business became the second largest contributor to Enron's net income, with earnings before interest and taxes of $122 million. The creation of the online trading model,
These scandals cost investors billions of dollars when the share prices of affected companies collapsed, and shook the publics’ faith in the security markets. When examining the SOX act you can see that since 2002 many things have changed in the past eight years. Corporate governance is one of many things that have changed; Public companies must now have a totally separate audit committee composed of entirely independent directors and must contain one financial expert. Security fraud now has much more extreme punishments for those who commit or conspire to commit fraud. Since the introduction of SOX auditors of public companies must keep documentation of an audit for seven years, destruction of any documentation or evidence that someone has committed fraud is now punishable by jail time and fine.
Executives and insiders knew about these offshore accounts that were mainly used to hide losses with the investors completely left in the dark. As a result their stock price was driven up. In their fallout, company executives began to liquidate their assets, trading millions of dollars worth of Enron stock. As the scandal unraveled, shares in Enron dropped from $90.00 to merely just pennies. The liquidity of most of Enron’s assets was apparent when the company reported its third-quarter results on October 17, 2001 as negative due to one-time charges of over $1 billion.
According to Clement (2006) unethical behavior in business is a growing concern. “In recent years, the business news in the United States has been rife with reports of misconduct by American corporations. The most widely publicized of these cases may be the accounting fraud at Enron and what was then MCI WorldCom; however, less trumpeted incidents of misconduct are troubling, as well. Examples of such lesser known events include consumer fraud at Prudential Financial, discriminatory practices at Morgan Stanley, and antitrust activity at DuPont. Given the recent misbehavior in the U.S. business world, a reasonable person might wonder just how unethical American business really is.
Crimes such as there are always unacceptable do to the creation of uncertainty in the markets. The fear is bad for business in the United States and in the world as a whole. Many investors’ lost substantial amounts of money due to the scandals. The Sarbanes-Oxley now places a tighter regulation and control on the reporting of a company’s financial reports while holding those within the company accountable with criminal charges. With all the modifications and changes that are now being enforces, business investments into public companies in the United States is
In concern of the movement, not everyone is happy and Wall Street embraces deregulation, undoing many of the rules put in place in the wake of the Great Depression to limit banks’ riskiest investments. The limits on interstate banking are gone; down came the wall separating commercial and investment banks. Wall Street did not respect people; they had only themselves in mind how they could become richer and the common people poorer. Their virtues are in question, Wall Street should have a professional code of ethics these are the roles that are supposed to govern the conduct of members of their given profession. Which Wall Street did not have in place or this would have never happen.
Auditor Crazy Eddie Question: What specific mistakes (apart from failure to notice “red flags”) did the auditor make? For each mistake, describe what the auditor should have done. If you were the Managing Partner for the CPA firm and had full knowledge of all the facts and events in this case, what changes in policy or procedures would you implement to make sure this audit failure does not occur in the future? The Crazy Eddie's financial statements had many fraudulent over and understatements done in many ways that the auditors should have caught. They created fictitious revenues by a number of means.
The purpose of the SOX Act in response to the fraudulent and misleading activities of large corporations such as Enron, Health South, Xerox, Global Crossing, and almost one thousand publicly traded companies. Fraud is defined as “a dishonest act by an employee that results in personal benefit to the employee at a cost to the employer” (Kimmel, Weygandt, & Kieso, 2011). The afore mentioned companies and many others committed fraud when they willingly published false and/or deceptive financial statements making their companies look like they were making huge profits, therefore causing their stock prices to soar and enticing the public to by more and more shares of their companies. Unfortunately, when the truth came out, the fraudulent actions of a few resulted in the loss of almost $5 trillion of stock market value and an undetermined amount for stockholders. Because of this fraudulent action, Congress had no choice but to intervene and pass legislation that would curtail this illegal
Its profit oriented objectives resulted unethical activities and $200,000 penalty. Consumers are making decisions based on the advertisements. The misleading/false advertising will lead the consumers to make wrong decisions. This action is also monopolistic behavior, which is unethical and limited by the competition act. The monopolistic behavior could affect the competition negatively and damage the smaller competitors.