With a pay package that included more than seven million shares and options, Dunlap stood to make more than $200 million personally if he could keep Sunbeam's stock price flying. In the spring of 1998, when Dunlap and his team ran out of tricks, Sunbeam corrected its books, declared bankruptcy, and the stock price plunged from $53 at its peak to just pennies today. In an ominous harbinger of the Enron scandal, the SEC discovered that Andersen accounting documents had been destroyed. In the case of Waste Management -- which in 1998 issued the largest corporate restatement before Enron -- the company had exaggerated its earnings by $1.7 billion. The SEC's investigation found a long-running cover-up -- not just by Waste Management, but by Andersen as well.
Their bankruptcies became inevitable as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and financial analysts began to see the signs of irregularities among numerous companies. When the SEC ordered the restatement of their financial reports in accordance with the GAAP rules, it turned out that these companies were mostly founded by inflated revenues and negative financial conditions. Short after, companies reputations and financial credibility began break like bubbles, in the wake of the ensuing investigations. The result of these action caused investors once again lost their trust and confidence in America’s publicly traded companies, which eventually led to more bankruptcies. As a result, multitudes became jobless, and the trend went from bad to worse throughout the decade.
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.
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.
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.
Accounting Fraud Examination October 12, 2011 Introduction As we look back on the first decade of the 21st Century, we see that Corporate America and the Financial Markets were riddled with corruption and fraud. At the beginning of the decade we saw the likes of Enron and WorldCom become insolvent due to accounting frauds of epic proportions. The one case that stands out amongst all of them is the Bernard Madoff case, which is considered to be the largest fraud case of all time. “Madoff managed to lure billions of dollars away from huge charities, as well as wealthy individuals in both the United States and Europe by getting them to invest in his hedge fund. He did so by claiming extraordinary returns (generally in the low double digits).
According to Paul Alexander Gusmorino, the main cause of the drastic downfall was the combination of unequal distribution of wealth and the extensive stock market speculation that took place in the later years of that decade. Speculation is a key term in this area of history. To put it simply, speculation is an involvement in risky business transactions in an attempt to quickly gain large amounts of wealth. The imbalance of wealth led to an unstable economy, while the stock excessive speculation kept the stock marker falsely high, eventually leading to a large crash. Authoritative figures tried to help out the economy in any way they could, but not all ended up helping.
ACRC: CORPRORATE GOVERNANCE FAILURE AT SATYAM 1. What are the reasons for the inadequate corporate governance at Satyam? The fall of Satyam can be attributed to many causes as mentioned below: * Raju had been manipulating Satyam’s financial books for a period of seven years and the major corporate governance issue was that the Board of Directors and the auditors were unable to catch hold of the issue for so long. * Raju and his family founded a group of companies called Maytas. It was owned by his sons and to ensure billion dollar targets for Maytas, Raju inflated cash and bank balances in Satyam’s financial records.
Lehman Brothers and its collapse was at the center of a political debate during the Financial Crisis which was based on theories of conspiracy, lessons being taught, and public pressure that was tied to political motives on the part of the Fed. There is no doubt that the downfall of investment bank Lehman Brothers was a major contributing factor to the Financial Crisis. There is however doubt regarding exactly why this financial institution was allowed to collapse and what specifically the ramifications were for the financial system as a whole. In the middle of March, 2008, the Federal government working with J. P. Morgan Chase bailed out Bear Sterns, however only several months later in September of the same year, Lehman Brothers was left to file for bankruptcy after the Federal government declined to rescue them. This inconsistency on the part of the government and the Federal Reserve contributed to the uncertainty which the Financial Crisis fostered.
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.