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What was the motivation for the Diamond Foods scandal? Be specific, simply stating “greed” is insufficient. The motivation behind the Diamond Foods accounting scandal was to inflate income on financial statements in the years of 2010 and 2011. The company was able to do this by making payments to walnut growers for their product which is an expense to the company; however, the payments that Diamond Foods made weren’t in the correct period and pushed into the following year. This made the financial statements show higher favorable revenue and lower expenses. Since this clearly is a violation of accounting procedures the financial statements of both years are considered unreliable. (Henning, 2012) In general, what is a conflict of interest? A conflict of interest is when an individual or group has more than one interest that can conflict with each other such as one interest can hurt another interest. What role did the board of directors at Diamond Foods play in creating conflicts of interest at the company? The board of directors had two different interests that conflicted when the accounting scandal occurred. The first interest was that the board of directors needed to impress stockholders and investors with higher earnings to show growth in the company. The second interest was that the company needed to follow accounting standards. The use of momentum payments inflated net revenue at the time when the company wanted to merge with Proctor and Gables Pringles line. They violated accounting procedures by offsetting the expenses making the actual impression to investors as an unreliable and risky company. (Henning, 2012) How should an auditor have responded to the conflicts of interest at Diamond Foods? An auditor would notice that the financial statements had violations of the accounting procedures by financial numbers being suspect such as the company had

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