Satyam : The Tiger Of India

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX), also known as the Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act and the Auditing Accountability and Responsibility Act, was signed into law on July 30, 2002, by President George W. Bush as a direct response to the corporate financial scandals of Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco International (Arens & Elders, 2006; King & Case, 2014;Rezaee & Crumbley, 2007). Fraudulent financial activities and substantial audit failures like those of Arthur Andersen and Ernst and Young had destroyed public trust and investor confidence in the accounting profession. The debilitating consequences of these perpetrators and their crimes summoned a massive effort by the government and the accounting profession to fight all forms of corruption through regulatory, legal, auditing, and accounting changes.

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.

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,

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).

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.

As the WMI accounting fraud case shows, change exposes organizations to considerable financial fraud risks. The top officials used acquisitions and merger as means to perpetuate this fraud. This financial fraud took place due to the organizational breakdown of internal and external audit controls. As a result, the top management was able to commit this massive fraud without facing any resistance. It never occurred to them that they were violating the law because what mattered to them was pocketing as much as they could.

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.

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 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.

Most of the world has heard of Enron, the American, mega-energy company that “cooked their books” ( ) and cost their investors billions of dollars in lost earnings and retirement funds. While much of the controversy surrounding the Enron scandal focused on the losses of investors, unethical practices of executives and questionable accounting tactics, there were many others within close proximity to the turmoil. It begs the question- who was really at fault and what has been done to prevent it from happening again?

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 is a complex political, social, and economic anomaly that negatively affects developing and developed countries. It weakens democratic institutions, holds economic development, widening the rich-poor gap and certainly leads to governmental instability. The World Bank definition of corruption states that “…the abuse of public office for private gain”.

Tyco International, a company started as research lab eventually became a billion dollar enter-prise through successive financial strategies. In 2002 Tyco came under headlines when it was accused of fraudulent accounting practices. As it turned out, this whole scandal was true the company was ripped off of $600 million by the CEO and CFO. Trials conducted penalized the corrupt and Tyco ended up paying $2.29 billion to its defrauded shareholders.

For every argument, relevant and sufficient references were provided. The purpose of the author was to explain how bribery was involved in all of the businesses operated in India, and how this affects the people, business and their government. The author’s idea is stated, then elaborated upon so that the reader can visualize and build their own perception and to be able to interpret and understand the bribery in India, and to a conclusion that India’s state of bribery was serious, unfair and non-transparent.

There are many sources of generation of black money and some of them are legal means and the others are illegal means. Practices such as weapon trading, terrorism, selling of counterfeit or stolen goods are some of the main illegal means. Where corruption is concerned, black money is earned through giving and taking of bribes by public officers.. Apart from this, the politicians and political parties take bribes from foreign companies and invest it in tax havens to transfer it to india when needed. It is also generated through evasion of taxes by hiding the income from public authorities. Commercial sector also generates a huge sum of black money by creating an imbalance between exports and imports by under-invoicing exports and over-invoicing imports from countries like Singapore, UAE, and Hong Kong etc. The figure bellow shows manipulations of accounts for tax evasion.