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Essay about Waste Management Fraud

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Waste Management Fraud
Waste Management, Inc. today is dedicated to serving our communities by collecting and disposing of garbage and recycling. Over the years they have had to deal with a rise of issues such as environmental and global warming. Waste Management has also tried to reduce its waste collections while turning any valuable resources it can into clean and renewable energy. Waste Management has been around since the late 1800’s, and is a holding company that has all its daily operations conducted through its subsidiaries. Since there are relatively few garbage disposal companies around, Waste Management has been able to grow and advance into a huge corporation that has built an employee base of 45,000. And with any growing …show more content…

He was the one that actually set the numbers for earning targets. He persuaded the others to use aggressive accounting practices and he was the spokesperson who announced fake numbers for the Company. Rooney was in charge of overseeing the profitability of the solid waste operations and sometimes actually used accounting decisions that resulted in a negative impact on the operations. Koenig was reported as having the primary responsibility for accomplishing the scheme. Not only did he mislead the company’s own audit team and internal accountants, he also withheld important information to outside auditors. He did this by destroying evidence. The SEC report also states that Hau was an expert at manipulating and carefully constructing the false disclosures. The other two just abetted in the scheme because of their roles within the company.
Many people wondered how the executives were able to continue with this scheme for so long. Why didn’t the auditors notice it and take action? And the answer is not so simple. The fraud was actually discovered years before the public found out. Arthur Anderson who is Waste Management’s outside auditor, discovered the fraud, or at the time the “improper accounting practices”. Arthur Anderson didn’t really take action and instead presented the company with a set of proposed adjusting journal entries to cover up the improper accounting practices. And this was done after Arthur Anderson issued the company an

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