The first step under Trevino and Nelson is to gather the facts. In this case, the manager was not aware of or chose to ignore the facts surrounding the Italian tax system. The knowledge that the bank had with respect to the Italian tax system was therefore incomplete. The facts in this case included the mores surrounding the Italian system of tax collection and negotiation. The manager was informed that it would be advisable to declare a low amount of income and was subsequently informed of the need to hire a commercialista to handle the negotiations. The manager failed to heed this advice, in particular because he thought that these practices were unethical. The manager should have gathered the facts with respect to the mores and customs of the Italian tax collection system. The second step under Trevino and Nelson is to define the ethical issues. In this case, the American manager felt that it was dishonest to underreport earnings on the tax form. The manager also identified the payment of bustarella, which was viewed almost as a corrupt practice. These issues were ethical to the American manager, who assumed that because the process was different and less transparent than the American tax system that it lacked ethical integrity. To the Italians, however, neither practice is considered to be unethical, and should not have been an ethical dilemma for the manager. The manager was caught feeling that there was an ethical dilemma because such practices conflicted with his
The Americans started off on an immoral basis by not adhering to the Italian local customs. The local regulations decrease may cause a tax burden. In the end, the general manager sent the Italian revenue service a check for the full amount of taxes due, even though the due date for the payment was almost six months later (Kelly 56). Paying this money resulted in penalty and it should have been avoided. The only option was to fire the American manager and hire an Italian manager who would follow the company’s commands of the Italian advisors. This is ethical wrong because the Italian banking system did not treat the American managers with respect for the persons and the
The second ethical problem in this case relates to the Rigas family’s use of publicly-held corporate funds as a personal “piggy bank.” The Rigases used the company jet for personal reasons “without approval of the Board of Directors”, on one occasion flying to Africa for a safari (Markon & Frank, 2002). On another, one of John Rigas’ sons used a corporate jet to pick up an actress friend of his (Grant, Young, & Nuzum, 2004). The former CFO claimed that Adelphia’s funds were used by one of Rigas’ sons to buy a condominium, and to build a $13M golf course (Grant, Young, & Nuzum,
Traditionally, the positive image of a company or a brand is very important in the contemporary world. As a result, the question of morality of each individual working within an organization is of a paramount importance. In such a situation there should be no exceptions from the rule and executives could not be in a privileged position. This is the desirable ideal many companies strive to achieve at least in a public eye. However, the reality turns to be quite different from what is expected and the analyzed case of an executive’s double standard is just another evidence of the fact that the real life is so complicated that the common rules, including moral
It is clear from the case study that Alistair knows the contract is unorthodox. The problem he faces is whether he should overlook the bribe or report it to the board. The board of directors expects Alistair to tell the truth and report the bribe because of: his position as Chief Legal Officer, the board has a very strong ethics policy and they are wary of unethical activities.
In the Leslie Fay case, the fraud triangle was not critically evaluated prior to the issuance of unqualified audit opinions. Kenia had no incentive to commit fraud – he owned no company stock and did not receive a compensation based incentive. Pomerantz and Polishan had both of the aforementioned items included within their compensation package. Further, due to the lavish lifestyle and overbearing personalities of both Pomerantz’s and Polishan, they also clearly would have had rationalizations and justifications for the fraud. Additionally, given the “tight ship” Polishan ran in the Wilkes-Barre accounting office, Kenia would not have had opportunity – but Polishan would have, especially considering his close friendship with Pomerantz (Knapp, 2011).
Ethical Issues prevail in every condition no matter how official or personal it is. Some of the ethical problems that may involve in this situation are fraudulent in financial accounting, misappropriation of assets and a tremendous amount of
It is imperative for tax professionals to understand the ethics environment of the practice. This paper is focused on the ethical responsibilities of tax professionals.
This study aims to understand what effect has an ethical framework in accounting. In particular, we examine the influence of ethics on earnings management, financial reporting, and external accounting. Today, the commercial environment reveals the unethical behavior of management and accountants through the manipulation of accounting records to boost the company’s stock price, falsified financial statements to mislead investors, failure of auditors to correct errors and omissions due to client’s pressure and personal material interests.
KPMG was one of the biggest accounting firms in the 90’s that with a lucrative end, would serve wealthy companies using forged revenues in order to avoid taxes. The accountants that worked for the firm were expected to meet certain quotas. Consequently, instead of trying to run an honest business they were trying to maximize the sales using all kinds of dishonest marketing approaches. KPMG employees used foreign banks as well as bogus law firm statements to preserve a legitimate business running. This accounting firm manipulated financial data of clients, costing the internal revenue service over 2.5 billion in lost tax revenue
According to the internal inspection report of the Societe Generale, certain control was absented throughout a period of time. This absent of certain control indicated that a fraud is occurred and alerted the company about it. However, even though Societe Generale is able to identify the problem, the compliance inspector of the company only conducted a routine reviews and did not have a deep detail checking on issues. Besides, the compliance inspector did not asking for any additional information from Kerviel and simply accepted Kerviel’s claims without putting any effort to validate it. Due to this, its shows that the compliance inspector of the bank is failed to identify the cause of the problems occurred which caused by the lack of
Ethical issues have greatly transformed in our lives since the great Enron, Xerox and other huge corporations proposed big profits showing earnings of billions of dollars and yet in reality facing bankruptcy. These corporations faced great trouble with the federals and state for manipulating financial statements. But not only corporations can be blamed on this, accounting firms were involved in this as much as the corporations were. With the business stand point, ethics comprises of principles and standards that guide behavior. Investors, traders, customers, and legal system determine whether a specific action is ethical or unethical. Ethical issue is a vast subject, but we will look at the niche
In the first ethical problem selected, two separate books were kept by personnel in the Adelphia financial management department with the intent of deceiving external auditors; thus leading shareholders and the public to believe that the company was ultimately worth more than it was in actuality. In the second, the Rigas family frivolously dwindled away public money for personal selfish consumption which is clearly a violation of the public’s trust. In the weeks following the unraveling of events and divulgence of information, a number of townspeople and investors were concerned that the family was rather free with shareholder money and further believed corporate money was used to finance public generosity as previously discussed in this paper (Barlaup, Hanne, & Stuart, 2009, p. 10).
Cable provider Adelphia was one of the major accounting scandals of the early 2000s that led to the creation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. A key provision of the Act was to create a stronger ethical climate in the auditing profession, a consequence of the apparent role that auditors played in some of the scandals. SOX mandated that auditors cannot audit the same companies for which they provide consulting services, as this link was perceived to result in audit teams being pressured to perform lax audits in order to secure more consulting business from the clients. There were other provisions in SOX that increased the regulatory burden on the auditing profession in response to lax auditing practices in scandals like Adelphia (McConnell & Banks, 2003). This paper will address the Adelphia scandal as it relates to the auditors, and the deontological ethics of the situation.
The key to the article “Cooking the Books” is to cover the business ethics of an accounting manager ordering one of his accountants to falsifying a company’s accounting ledger. The Generally Accepted Accounting Principle of expense recognition was not followed. The accounting manager was attempting to commit fraud for personal gain, he does this by manipulating the books to show higher revenue in order to meet the volume for management bonus. The accounting manager also created a hostile working environment by threating his accountant’s job security if he didn’t comply with his orders. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act will also be explored to see if there was a violation due to the unethical behavior of the
witnesses also are included in the case. The primary issue in this case (drawn from actual