Egregious Accounting Scandal: Waste Management Corp.

* Refused to record expenses necessary to write off the costs of unsuccessful and abandoned landfill development projects,

The Enron and WorldCom scandals were arguably the incidents that permanently changed the procedures for accounting controls. In response to these incidents, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) of 2002 was passed. Once the knowledge of these scandals was made public, a number of subsequent accounting scandals were discovered in public companies such as Tyco International, HealthSouth, and American Insurance Group. In addition, a then-employee-owned company, Post, Buckley, Schuh & Jernigan, Inc. (dba PBS&J, now known as “Atkins North America, Inc.”), was also hit by a similar accounting scandal. Henceforth, a case study of PBS&J is presented where we will examine the fraudulent transactions that

Undercover Boss is a television series exposing CEOs and their companies publicly. The main goal of this series is to make the businesses better and by CEOs working on the frontline, they will learn what their people are experiencing every day.

In the later part of 1990s, there was an epidemic of accounting scandals which arose with the disclosure of financials transgressions by trusted corporate executives. The misdeeds involved misusing or misdirecting funds, understating expenses, overstating the value of corporate assets or underreporting the existence of liabilities, and overstating of revenues.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 was the result of a number of large financial scandals in the United States in the late 1990s and early 2000s. One of the most well-known corporate accounting scandals was the Enron scandal, which was exposed in 2001. Enron, an energy company that was considered one of the most financially sound corporations in the United States before the scandal, produced false earnings reports to shareholders and kept large debts off the accounting books (Peavler, 2016). Enron executives also committed fraud by embezzling corporate funds and manipulating the stock market. Enron shareholders lost around $74 billion dollars, Enron employees lost their retirement accounts, and some Enron employees even lost their jobs (The 10 Worst Corporate Accounting Scandals of All Time, n.d.).

Stan is thinking about starting a toxic waste disposal business. He plans to collect the waste from businesses that produce it and then dispose of it in a sanitary landfill. In order to start this business, Stan will need a substantial amount of money to buy and develop the landfill site and purchase five trucks capable of transporting toxic waste.

Did you know there is about a million pounds of material in order to provide one average middle-class American family 's needs for one year? In sum, Americans waste or cause to be wasted nearly 1 million pounds of materials per, and did you know that an average person waste is 4.3 pounds per day? Did you also know that the water in the lake and river have about 3 tons?

Did you there is about million pounds of material in order to provide one average middle-class American family 's needs for one year? In sum, Americans waste or cause to be wasted nearly 1 million pounds of materials per, and did you know that an average person waste is 4.3 pounds per day? Did you also know that the water in the lake and river have about 3 tons?

The Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) are a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization that advocates to eliminate waste, mismanagement, and inefficiency in the federal government.

The Company was a manufacturer of computer hard disk drives (Financial Executives Research Foundation, 2015) based in Longmont Colorado in 1989. The CEO, CFO and other members of management sought to defraud by managing earnings of the Company with fraudulent inventory, receivables and journal entries. The executives and management created boxes of inventory with bricks and scraps of metal for the auditors

Waste Management Inc., hereafter referred to as WMI, was established in 1968by Wayne Huizenga, Dean Buntrock, and Larry Beck. The company provided environmental and waste services in Canada and the United States. By 1990, due to strong growth via operations and acquisitions, WMI grew to become the major waste management company in the region. Unfortunately, actual growth was supported by aggressive accounting policies. However, with the fall of real; growth and profitability, Buntrock and his team started to manipulate financial reports of the company in order to keep its successful appearance (Brook and Dunn, 677).

Gap has been discovered to have sweatshops in a 2010 scandal. This scandal really focused around hours as in employees working overtime without the proper compensation and possibly being fired for not willingly taking on extra hours of work. The employees could have worked up to 8 hours of overtime a day and only be paid about half the legal amount of compensation for overtime hours. (Chamberlain, 2010, 1) This particular scandal revolved around a sweatshop discovered in India. According to David MacIntyre, the workers typically worked for 16 hours a day for less than 40 cents a day (2014, 1). This would mean that an individual worker would be paid approximately 2.5 cents an hour. That year, 2010, Gap had a gross profit of 5,889 million dollars

The scandal that started the series of accounting scandals is Waste Management Inc. Waste Management Inc. is a publicly traded waste management company that reported 1.7 billion dollars in fake earnings (US Government Accountability Office, 2002). The accounting scandal was discovered in 1998 when a new chief executive officer took a look at the financial statements. The

While Waste Management continued to produce false numbers to the public, Buntrock used company money to make charitable contributions and present himself as a decent, ethical person (Securities and Exchange Commission: 2002). He received large amounts of money while he perpetrated the fraud, and his executive team was incentivized for their role as well.

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.