After reading A Letter from Prison I have many takeaways and lessons learned. It is absolutely imperative that companies maintain their financial documents with as much accuracy and honesty as possible, and do their due diligence in taking whatever measures appropriate to have accurate financial data. If a company does not understand how to properly record revenue than it is their due diligence to comply with the accounting standards that are set and they must hire employee’s who understand how to properly handle the situation. The ethics within this case are very negative when it comes to revenue recognition and the backdating of software contracts. Recognizing revenue within certain time periods for future contracts that may or may not actually occur was another take-away from this case: you simply can’t do that and still comply with generally accepted accounting principles. The payments for these contracts were not reasonably assured because of the multi-year lengths, and, this was my “ah-ha” moment when reading this case. Safeguarding financial reporting is more about the reporting companies than anything else in my observation with a letter from prison. The company chose to backdate contracts and recognize revenue improperly without informing their auditors of these decisions or situations that were occurring. I do think that within other companies sometimes it is about the auditors and their role is to provide honest and professional auditing work of the financial statements, but, if they do not have all of the evidence, they cannot perform their job accordingly. This example is another reason why I think the safeguarding of financial reporting falls back on the company, and its ethical standards to provide reasonable and accurate as possible financial reporting is their responsibility. If the company decides not to disclose certain information then that