Accounting – Fraud case Satyam Systems, a global IT company based in India, has just been added to a notorious list of companies involved in fraudulent financial activities, one that includes such names as Enron, WorldCom etc. The Satyam Computer Services scandal was publicly announced on 7 January 2009, when Chairman Ramalinga Raju confessed that Satyam's accounts had been falsified. The preliminary investigations by Registrar of Companies and confession by Mr. Raju revealed the balance sheet of Satyam for the year 2008 contained `cash and bank balances’ of Rs 5040 crore (US $ 1.12 billion) as against the Rs 5361 crore (US$ 1.12 billion) reflected in the books, an accrued interest of Rs 376 crore (US$ 83.85 million) which was described by Raju as `non existent’ , an understated liability of Rs. 1,230 crore (US$ 274.29 million) on account of funds was arranged by himself and an overstated debtors' position of Rs. 490 crore (US$ 109.27 million) as against Rs.
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.
The SEC's investigation found a long-running cover-up -- not just by Waste Management, but by Andersen as well. Andersen and Waste Management paid a steep price in stockholder settlements, but no one went to jail. The SEC fined Andersen $7 million in June 2001, and Andersen promised to shore up its internal oversight -- but by then they were already deeply enmeshed in new trouble at
The ultimate goal is to protect investors. Reason Many acts of corporate corruption in the 1990s and early 2000s brought on this regulation. There were many loopholes that allowed for accounting errors without any legal incentive to correct the problem. Due to the accounting practices at companies such as Enron, Tyco, and WorldCom investors lost billions. The accounting practices created a scandal in which the companies were able to hide information from investors.
Had her company had proper controls in place for travel and expense reimbursements, this probably would have occurred to this magnitude. Donnelly was targeted in an internal investigation because she was one of three employees with the highest amounts of travel and expense reimbursements totaling, $115,000. One of the red flags in the case was the fact that Donnelly’s supervisor had only submitted $40,000 in travel and expense reimbursements that year. It turned out that Donnelly had been using several different schemes to accumulate such an outrageous amount of travel and expense reimbursements. The first of these schemes would be the mischaracterized expense reimbursements scheme.
The stockholders in this case filed a lawsuit against Beazer and some of its officers for "issuing false and misleading statements regarding the company's business prospects and not disclosing facts the defendants knew related to alleged improper lending practices in its mortgage origination business" (Burney, 2009, p. 1). This case was settled with Beazer's insurance company paying $30.5 million. In this case, the restatement of past financial statements wreaked havoc on Beazer Homes USA. It began with an internal investigation, which led to an investigation by the SEC and ended with several lawsuits and large quantities of money being spent to settle
Brief overview of WorldCom’s case and general discussion of its fraud nature: Beresford, Katzenbach and Jr (2003) stated that, from 1999 until 2002, a few executives at WorldCom perpetrated accounting fraud that led to the largest bankruptcy in history. The principle business strategy of its CEO – aggressive growth through acquisitions underlined its collapse and eventually imposed pressure to management to commit fraud. In fact, WorldCom’s fraud was a consequence of a set of complex factors, including the existence of dominant senior management, structurally weak internal controls, inadequate audits by Arthur Andersen, the poor oversight of the Board, and pressure from Wall Street’s expectation, etc. The large scale collapses of WorldCom and Enron triggered immediate remedies of corporate governance, essentially the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which aimed to solve the issue of “lack of confidence” in the reported financials. WorldCom’s fraud was an intentional misconduct of the perpetrated senior management that results in an $11 billion material misstatement in the financial statements via two principle forms: reduction of the reported line costs and exaggeration of reported revenues, in order to create an image of increased earnings and revenue and hold the line costs lower than the industry average rather than indicate the truth and fairness of WorldCom’s wealth and progress (Beresford et al, 2003).
The irregular accounting practices, including manipulating stock prices, caused Enron to have to file bankruptcy in December of 2001 (Thomas, 2002). The scandal is the most significant corporate collapse in the United States since the failure of many savings and loan banks during the 1980s (Hanson, 2002). Enron collapsed for many reasons. .Among the many reasons were the lack of attention shown by members of the Enron board of directors to the books financial entities and the lack of truthfulness by management about the health of the company and its business operations (Hanson, 2002). The firm’s senior managers had engaged in fraud for an extended period through a scheme in which partnerships owned by the managers could receive payment for goods and services never provided to Enron.
However, the traders were fired once it was revealed that Enron's reserves were gambled away which nearly destroyed the company. After these facts were brought to light, Ken Lay denies having any knowledge of wrongdoing. Needless to say, when required to testify before the U.S. Congress on the reasons for Enron’s collapse, Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling and Andrew Fastow, sought refuge under the Fifth Amendment. Andrew Fastow, Jeffrey Skilling, and Kenneth Lay are among the most notable top-level executives implicated in the collapse of Enron’s. Kenneth Lay, the former chairman of Enron was prosecuted on 11 criminal counts of making misleading statements and fraud.
On July 22, 2002, MCI WorldCom (hereafter known as WorldCom) filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the largest filing in U.S. History at the time (Beltran, 2002). It is clear that senior-level executives were holding the reigns throughout the elaborate and, what one analyst called, “incredibly elegant (Simons, 2002),” scam, intended to defraud investors and Wall Street. To someone not familiar with accounting processes, the case becomes difficult to understand. The executives were falsifying accounting entries, both creating accounting line items that did not exist and counterfeiting actual entries to inflate earnings (Boatright, p.44). The 1990s proved to be an excellent decade for WorldCom, particularly after the 1997 purchase of MCI, which was the largest national long-distance phone carrier at the time, and resulted in the largest corporate merger in the history of the United States.