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.
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
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.
During an investigation there were many questionable accounting transactions that were brought up, such as large executive bonuses as well as many loans for large amounts of money that were later forgiven without repayment. Kozlowski and Swartz were sentenced to 8 – 25 years in prison ("Investopedia", 2014). Then a lawsuit against Tyco cost the company $2.92 billion in repayment to its investors ("Investopedia", 2014). The biggest issue here was allowing for a CEO and CFO to have too much access to funds. A protocol should be in place that when a sale of stocks is made and no one authorized it then a full audit should take place from a third party or if a loan is going to be made then more then just the CEO and CFO’s approval needs to be given.
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.
Sarbanes-Oxley Act Article Analysis Susana Hernandezvargas ACC/340 June 07, 2013 David De La Calzada Sarbanes-Oxley Act Article Analysis There have been multiple business scandals surrounding internal control such as those associated with WorldCom, Enron, and many others. These events led to Congress passing the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. The commonality in all of these cases was the false reporting of financial transactions. In addition, all these company’s shareholder’s experienced heavy losses as a result of transactions being misinterpreted. With the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in place investors are now protected through the improvement of reliability and accuracy of corporate disclosures made in accordance with the securities laws money (Bagranoff, Simkin, & Strand-Norman, 2008).
National Research University Higher school of economics The Theory of Money, Banking and Financial Markets Breaking up Banks and Financial institutions that are “Too Big To Fail” Moscow 2011 Large financial institutions generally do business with a lot of other companies. If such company fails, other companies, employees, investors, counterparties will get hurt. It can be disastrous to an economy. It’s an idea of definition for financial institutions that “Too Big To Fail”. The precise definition is that TBTF companies are certain financial institutions that are so large and so interconnected that their failure will have a disastrous effect throughout the economy.
Enron was described as “House Of Cards” as it was built over a pool of gasoline. It all sort of became smoke and mirror. Louis Borget, former Enron's CEO was also exposed to be rerouting company’s money to offshore accounts. Once their schemes were discovered by the auditors, Kenneth Lay encourages them to "keep making us millions". However, the traders were fired once it was revealed that Enron's reserves were gambled away which nearly destroyed the company.
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.