Essay about The Loss of Ethics and Trust in Corporations Today

According to the Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404 Act, it is the responsibility of the management to establish and maintain internal controls required for financial reporting. The company’s latest year assessment of

Section 404 of the act requires that the auditor attest to and issue a report on management’s assessment of internal control over financial reporting. To express an opinion on internal controls, the auditor obtains an understanding of and performs tests of controls related to all significant account balances, classes of transactions, and disclosures and related assertions in the financial statements (Arens, 2010).

I am not familiar with the law nor do I know if it is currently being used in my organization. Based on my research, Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act requires public companies' annual reports to include the company's own assessment of internal control over financial reporting, and an auditor's attestation. Since the law was enacted, however, both requirements have been postponed for smaller public companies. Under the Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404, all public organizations are mandated to publish information in their annual reports in regards to the scope and adequacy of the internal control structure and procedures of their financial reporting. This information is then used to assess the efficiency in the internal control and procedures

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act was a law created in 2002 to ensure that the boards of public companies oversee their companies in a more competent and transparent way in order to protect investors. Section 302 refers to the obligations of the corporate officers who sign the financial reports. The officers are responsible for verifying that the report is accurate and represents a true picture of the company’s financial condition. Section 401 states that The Commision must evaluate the financial reports. Section 404 covers the company’s internal control structure and the requirements of the accounting firm in assessing internal controls and reporting procedures. Section 409 requires a company to disclose information on changes to financial conditions or

Internal controls represent an organization’s processes and procedures used to meet its goals and objectives and serve as a defense in safeguarding assets and preventing and detecting errors, fraud, and abuse. Effective internal controls provide reasonable assurance that an organization’s objectives are achieved through (1) reliable financial reporting, (2) compliance with laws and regulations, and (3) effective and efficient operations. The passing of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, as well as the numerous corporate frauds and bankruptcies over the past decade—including some

2. Ethical Issues in Business. It seems that every day in the news we are hearing of new company that has acted at least unethically and possibly illegally in the operation and financial reporting of their company's business dealings. There are many ethical issues in business. One major issue that we see is over and under reporting net income. Companies like to show that every quarter the net income of the business has an increase or profit. In order to show this they adopt unethical or illegal means in the operation and financial reporting. One such method is the indiscriminate use of stock options for employees that enable companies to take employment costs off balance sheet and inflate earnings. With the recent ethical issues we have

Review the report of the independent registered public accounting firm on internal controls. Explain components of the report that meet the criteria established in Internal Control-Integrated Framework issued by the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (COSO) and the PCAOB.

The object of this essay is to establish whether there is an ethical theory that can be successfully applied to business organizations. In order to answer this question, it is necessary first to define the major ethical theories, which are utilitarianism, deontology and virtue ethics, before determining whether there are any other options. After that, the ethical needs, problems and limitations of work organizations will have to be examined so that the different theories can be evaluated in this context. It will also be important to draw a distinction between the terms “accurate” and “useful” as these actually result in two different questions the answer to which need not necessarily be the same. Another essential part of this discussion

Corporate fraud has grabbed national headlines repeatedly in the last year. Although, Enron and World Com are two of the highest profile cases of corporate scam, ethics in the business world are generally deplorable. One of the most morally reprehensible cases to hit the newspapers in the past several years is that of Robert R. Courtney. His sense of business and personal ethics reflects moral depravity at its darkest moment. What he did was evil on both a business and certainly on a personal level. As a pharmacist, he was entrusted by patients, oncologists, and major drug companies, to fill prescriptions for cancer patients. He defied and denied this trust. Apparently he owed the IRS $600,000, and ironically

Ethics is something that is very important to have especially in the business world. Ethics is the unwritten laws or rules defined by human nature; ethics is something people encounter as a child learning the differences between right and wrong. In 2001, Enron was the fifth largest company on the Fortune 500. Enron was also the market leader in energy production, distribution, and trading. However, Enron's unethical accounting practices have left the company in joint chapter 11 bankruptcy. This bankruptcy has caused many problems among many individuals. Enron's employees and retirees are suffering because of the bankruptcy. Wall Street and investors have taken a major downturn do to the company's unethical practices. Enron's competitors

Corporate social responsibility has become a major issue in the recent past to the extent in which there are watchdog organizations that monitor actions of corporations and file a report indicating companies that aren’t socially responsible. Such organizations are known as sustainability auditing firms (Gallagher, 2012). This has made most of the companies that are growing to issue corporate social responsibility reports alongside their annual business reports. Citigroup is a financial service company that has been able to do this with other companies. In fact, it should be noted that Citigroup, Inc. is the world’s largest financial service corporations with a revenue base of over 130 billion dollars (MacDonald, 2011). Citigroup, Inc. has appeared in the list of Forbes 100 and was been rated in 2007 as one of the most responsible top 50 companies. The company employs more than 300000 employees today. Hence, this paper will look at the extent to which Citigroup, Inc. has put in place responsible practices and corporate ethics and how they account for the influence of their stakeholder’s actions (Carroll & Buchholtz, 2010).

Ethical Lessons Learned from Corporate Scandals Ethics is about behavior and in the face of dilemma; it is about doing the right thing. Ideally, managerial leaders and their people will act ethically as a result of their internalized virtuous core values. The Enron scandal is the most significant corporate collapse in the United States and it demonstrates the need for significant reforms in accounting and corporate governance in the United States. It is also a call for a close look at the ethical quality of the culture of business generally and of business corporations (Lessons from the Enron Scandal).

A business can not work out without an account system, which includes internal. Internal controls are used by companies to make sure financial information is accurate and valid. Strong internal controls are signs of a financially healthy company and protect the company’s integrity. Strong internal controls can also increase a company’s profitability. There are several types of internal controls that companies used to protect themselves such as: Segregation of duties, asset purchases, supervisor review, internal audits and adequate documents and records. This paper will discuss several topics from a case study about And the Fraud

Section 404 requires public companies to establish internal controls and report annually on their effectiveness over financial reporting. The CFO and CEO are held personally responsible for the internal controls via the requirement to sign a statement certifying the adequacy of the internal control system (Moffett and Grant, 2011, p. 3). Additionally, the company’s independent auditor must issue an attestation regarding management’s assessment of the internal structure as part of the company’s annual report (Bloch, 2003, p. 68).

Ethics is the branch of philosophy that deals with the principles correlated to human behavior concerning the rightness and wrongness of specific conduct, and to the good and bad that influences and ends those actions (Ditonary.com, 2011). In other words, ethics is the choice people effect in regards to a decision they need to achieve. Without ethics directing the choice an individual makes, moral preferences of what should or should not be done becomes irrelevant. While ethical decisions are made every day there are two different regions in which these choices are made.