Satyam : The Tiger Of India

India’s domestic business has seen high levels of corruption; more commonly the fraudulent behaviours and bribery of government officials and civil servants. This creates an unlevel playing field between domestic business and foreign business. Evidently this seemingly small issue of corruption could potentially tarnish India’s position as favoured destination of foreign investment (Mendiolaza, 2012).

Between the years 2000 and 2002 there were over a dozen corporate scandals involving unethical corporate governance practices. The allegations ranged from faulty revenue reporting and falsifying financial records, to the shredding and destruction of financial documents (Patsuris, 2002). Most notably, are the cases involving Enron and Arthur Andersen. The allegations of the Enron scandal went public in October 2001. They included, hiding debt and boosting profits to the tune of more than one billion dollars. They were also accused of bribing foreign governments to win contacts and manipulating both the California and Texas power markets (Patsuris, 2002). Following these allegations, Arthur Andersen was investigated for, allegedly,

The word “fraud” was magnified in the business world around the end of 2001 and the beginning of 2002. No one had seen anything like it. Enron, one of the country’s largest energy companies, went bankrupt and took down with it Arthur Andersen, one of the five largest audit and accounting firms in the world. Enron was followed by other accounting scandals such as WorldCom, Tyco, Freddie Mac, and HealthSouth, yet Enron will always be remembered as one of the worst corporate accounting scandals of all time. Enron’s collapse was brought upon by the greed of its corporate hierarchy and how it preyed upon its faithful stockholders and employees who invested so much of their time and money into the company. Enron seemed to portray that the goal of corporate America was to drive up stock prices and get to the peak of the financial mountain by any means necessary. The “Conspiracy of Fools” is a tale of power, crony capitalism, and company greed that lead Enron down the dark road of corporate America.

Corporations around the world have exhibited ethical business practices. However, some corporations gave into unethical business practices such as fraud, dishonesty, and scams. One particular dishonest act that remained common amongst companies such as Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco was the fabrication of financial statements. These companies were reporting false information on their financial statements so that it would appear that the companies were making profits. However, those companies were actually losing money instead. Because of these companies’ actions, the call to have American businesses to be regulated under new rules served as a very important need. In 2002, Paul Sarbanes from the Senate and Michael G. Oxley from the House of Representatives created what is now known as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.

During the late 1990s and early 2000s, several companies like Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia, Global Crossing and Tyco, just to name a few, were embroiled in corporate fraud, greed and manipulation. These businesses were intentionally deceiving the public, their investors and even their employees. Company executives were hiding company expenses and liabilities, misreporting company finances in order to increase stock prices. External audit agencies that were hired to examine and certify financial statements for accuracy, were basically

Some can say that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 is working while some say that there still ways to get around to committing corporate fraud. Washington wants to crack down on corporate fraud so they came up with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002 that was designed to protect the interest of investors. “The Sarbanes-Oxley Act established oversight of public corporate governance and financial reporting obligations and redesigned accountability and ethics standards…” (Ferrell, O., Hirt, G., & Ferrell, L., 2009). The act was an important stepping-stone in the right direction especially when responding to the financial scandals of Enron and WorldCom. Those scandals shook customer’s faith and confidence in corporate management of private organizations.

Lack of integrity, incomplete discloser, and unwilling to speak the truth are all scopes of dishonesty (Ferrell, Fraedrich, & Ferrell, 2013). Some businesses prompt and participate in dishonorable activities through unethical behavior. This is the very reason why today’s economy faces financial disaster. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act appears to have a strong grasp on controlling the financial environment in organizations; however, other financial disasters will more than likely hit home. Because these transgressions will emanate additional legislation might greatly prevent future misconducts. For this reason, legislations continue to recover with up-to-date implementations.

Patterson and J. Reed Smith, have distinctly observed that once under closely scrutiny, managers inclined to commit fraud included certain weaknesses with their auditing plan. Fortunately, under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, managers can and in fact penalized for their choice of system control. Moreover, dishonest managers chose a stronger system – this complicates the issue in its entirety as it conveys to the auditor that he is honest. The most interesting aspect of audit risk under Sarbanes-Oxley is: “Finally, audit risk, which is the probability of undetected fraud, goes up with Sarbanes-Oxley, while expected fraud goes down” (Patterson and Read, 429). This implies that a certain weakness exists within the boundaries of Sarbanes-Oxley, a weakness that may not necessarily be easy to locate rather easier to

The Enron scandal was one of the most notorious bankruptcies of all time. Many people know about the energy titan’s downfall but less realize that it was also one of the biggest auditing blunders in American corporate history, leading to the dissolution of the Arthur Andersen LLP, which at the time was one of the five largest auditing and accountancy partnerships in the world. The most intriguing aspect of this case is that Andersen was eventually cleared by the United States Supreme Court, yet the company still failed to live on due to its tarnished reputation stemming from its unethical behaviors. The pressure to generate revenue for clients while simultaneously auditing their books became too large a burden for the firm and they eventually resorted to unethical means to achieve their objectives. The demise of the Andersen accounting firm shows the true importance of practicing good ethics and maintaining a good reputation amongst peers; the vitality of the business could depend on sustaining a clean image in the ever-changing business world.

Fraudulent, erroneous, and illegal acts committed by a public company, usually at a managerial or executive level, have been a very serious problem for many years and have prompted development of strict and updated regulations, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, in an attempt to prevent these occurrences. Unfortunately, these new or updated regulations are not enough to prevent these acts from happening, thus not alleviating the auditors of their responsibility to detect fraud. Some methods that management and auditors can employ to prevent and detect fraud, errors, and illegal acts are: improving knowledge, improving skills,

The author of this report is asked to present a report that covers a real corporate fraud and how to help prevent it through techniques and metrics. The author is asked to present five major answers. The first answer is to how to implement the investigation and thus help fetter out who is the culprit and how deep and wide the fraud goes. The second question asks the author to detail what types of surveillance and review will be undertaken including techniques that are covert and unknown to the people being watched up to and including the highest executives of the firm. Red flags that would arise suspicions are to be identified as well as key practices to be used interviews with people with potential knowledge or even involvement in such crimes. In conclusion, a fraud prevention plan will be articulated.

The perfect fraud storm occurred between the years 2000 and 2002 involving two of the largest energy and telecom corporations in the United States: Enron and WorldCom. It was determined that both organizations fraudulently overstated assets, created assets from expenses or overstated revenues, costing investors billions of dollars and resulting in both organizations declaring bankruptcy (Albrecht, Albrecht, Albrecht & Zimbelman, 2012). Nine factors contributed to fraud triangle creating this perfect fraud storm, and assisting management in concealing the fraud until exposed and rectified.

Unfortunately, scandals like Enron are not isolated incidents and the last decade has offered Americans a disheartening perspective with comparable scandals like that of WorldCom and Tyco, Sunbeam, Global Crossing and many more. Companies have a concrete responsibility not just to their investors but to society as a whole to have practices which deter corporate greed and looting and which actively and effectively work to prevent such things from happening. This

Corruption in India is a consequence of the nexus between Bureaucracy, politics and criminals. India is now no longer considered a soft state. It has now become a consideration state where everything can be had for a consideration. Today, the number of ministers with an honest image can

Currently, the government of India counts on two main laws to solve the issue of corruption, the Criminal Law of the PRC and the Law Against Unfair Competition of the PRC. The first law, also known as common bribery, applies to the bribery of state officials and employees of state owned enterprises, which are most of China’s large companies. Under this law, anyone who demands or accepts money or property in return for benefits is guilty of bribery. The second law is known as commercial bribery. Under this law, businesses are prohibited from giving money or property to customers to sell purchase products.