Sunbeam Corporation and Chainsaw Al

By manipulating the financial statements, the company gave a false impression on its future prospects of the company, allowing them to more freely raise capital through the issuance of common stock, and inadvertently inflating stock prices.

Phar-Mor, Inc was a thriving discount grocery store in the late 1980’s. Phar-Mor was moving product quickly but profit margins were not significant enough to pay the bills. By the early 1990’s, Phar-Mor declared bankruptcy due to fraudulent financial reporting and misappropriation of assets, making it one of the largest frauds in U.S. history. Below, we will use auditing standard AU 316.85 Appendix A in conjunction with the video “How to Steal $500 million” to analyze how incentives/pressures, opportunities, and attitudes/rationalizations allowed for fraud to start and continue at Phar-Mor.

During the year 2000, Enron was exceeding all expectations, its stock was through the roof, and the company seemed to be on top of the world. The next year Enron declared bankruptcy. So how did a company rise and fall so quickly? The key in analysing this question lies in Enron’s organizational culture, which is defined as “a shared meaning held by members distinguishing an organization” (Robbins and Judge, Essentials of Organizational Behavior, 269). During its prime, Enron appeared to be a successful and innovative company, but in reality was a company rooted in an organizational culture of corruption and greed. The five culture dimensions of stability, risk taking and innovation, attention to detail, outcome orientation, and aggressiveness are key to understanding how unethical behavior became such a problem at Enron.

Such an intense focus has been placed on quarterly earnings as an indication of a company’s success by everyone from analysts to executives that ethics have for the most part been thrown out the window, sacrificed to the all important number, i.e. earnings per share. This is the theory in Alex Berenson’s book “The Number: How the Drive for Quarterly Earnings Corrupted Wall Street and Corporate America.” This number has become part of a game to be played, a figure to be manipulated – beat the number and Wall Street all but throws a parade, miss it and a company’s stock may be abandoned. Take into account the incentives that executives have to beat the number and one can find plenty of reasons to manage earnings.

HealthSouth Corporation was one of the largest publicly traded owners of rehabilitative hospitals within the Untied States and paved the way for its industry. However, prior to 2003 the company had a very dark secret: fraud. In 2003 HealthSouth was accused of making $2.7 billion in false journal entries in the company’s system (Helios, 2013). These false entries allowed the corporation to inflate its earnings and revenue. While the corporation was dabbling in a fraudulent, aggressive account system, auditors were unable to detect the extent of the fraud occurring. If not for Michael Vines and Weston Smith, HealthSouth Corporation might have continued its false entries and continued deceiving shareholders and even Wall Street itself. HealthSouth serves as a historical example of how corporate culture can use fraud and deception schemes to not only rationalize what it is doing, which is an element of the fraud triangle, but also encourage fraudulent financial statements.

Quicken Loans has been successful in creating a corporate culture that is “an exceptional and rewarding place to work”. (Salinger, 2007) In the case of “Fun plus hard work equals success for Quicken Loans” the corporate culture is investigated. The study highlights the fact that the “corporate culture mixes causal with high energy”. (Gallagher & Reindl 2013) Quicken employees either “adapt to this high-energy culture or work can seem a high-pressure chamber where leaders extol workers to sell, sell, sell”. (Gallagher & Reindl 2013) This analysis will take into consideration case studies, theses, and interviews to dissect and apply cultural theory to the corporate environment at the Detroit office of Quicken.

Like several companies, Nortel stipendiary their executives with stock choices (Collins, 2011). This compensation solely inspired the tendency to be but honest regarding the company’s finances. author closely-held stock choices that solely inspired his actions to fulfill or beat the benchmark set by analysts. If Nortel’s earnings showed to be higher than the benchmark, Nortel’s stock costs would rise creating the stock closely-held by management to be even a lot of valuable. By tweaking the books to indicate the road earnings price as critical the allowable accumulation price he created the stakeholders assume that the corporate was creating extra money than it had been. “Nortel ne'er incomprehensible a benchmark over the sixteen quarters (Collins, 2011).” it had been too tempting to bump the numbers up so the stocks gave the impression to be value over they were. “Nortel’s accounting practices junction rectifier to AN investigation by AN freelance review committee, that found that insubordination with accumulation and accounting fraud were undertaken to fulfill internally obligatory earnings targets (Collins, 2011).”

What are the pressures that lead executives and managers to “cook the books?” There are several factors that can come into play. For WorldCom, it started with the deterioration of the industry in 2000. This was due to overcapacity, heightened competition, the economic recession, the dot-com bubble collapse, and a reduced demand for telecommunications services. All of these factors put extra pressure on WorldCom’s most important performance indicator, the expense-to-revenue ratio. The company was so concerned about keeping it above 42% that they were willing to do anything, even commit fraud. Bernie Ebbers told the senior staff that they would lose everything if the company did not improve its performance.

Through out his tenure at Sunbeam,Al Dunlap’s advocated profit by firing many employees and shutting down many factories.If we look at it in the short term ,this approach seems very attractive as it brings in quick short term

1. Get the right management team. As Dunlap assumes office, he retained only one senior executive from Sunbeam’s old management team. Dunlap first hire was Russ Kersh, a former employee of Dunlap, as executive vice president of Finance & Admin. The new management team also

From my perspective, Sunbeam’s board made a wise decision in firing Al Dunlap, and it was an example of effective corporate governance as the decision stopped Dunlap to further impair tone at the top in Sunbeam and further generate agency cost within Sunbeam. According to SEC litigation release No. 17001, during Dunlap’s tenure in Sunbeam, Dunlap was involved in applying improper earning management such as channel stuffing and “cookie jar”

Following are the changes that Al Dunlap initiated after being hired by Sunbeam Inc and the probable opportunities that Dunlap used to manage earnings:

The vision of Cooper Industries, as stated in the case, was to do an ‘outstanding job at the unglamorous part by making necessary products of exceptional quality.’ The goal was to operate in industries that had become somewhat of a necessity for consumers. Examples of such industries include: power transmission, hand tools, drilling and others. Cooper industries had started in 1833, as an iron foundry, and had existed most of its 150 years as a small sized maker of engines and compressors. However, all this changed in the 1960s, when the management decided to expand the company to lessen its dependence on the capital expenditures of the cyclical natural gas business.

The executives of Waste Management, in order to save their jobs and keep/increase their personal bonuses, manipulated financial records in order to give the appearance to investors that certain earnings targets were

Gainesboro Corporation was founded in 1923 by two mechanical engineers, James Gaines and David Scarboro. It was the industry leader in press and mould manufacturing. Its revenues declined from $911 million in 1998 to $757 million in 2004. To combat the decline in revenues and weakening profit margin it followed a two prong approach. First it devoted a greater share of its research and development budget to CAD/CAM to establish its industry leadership. Second the company underwent two major restructuring. The company had set the objective of achieving 15% CAGR growth.