Teaching Notes HealthSouth Corporation: Fraud, Greed and Corporate Governance Case Summary During the 1990s, Richard M. Scrushy, the former CEO of HealthSouth Corporation, engineered many acquisitions of rehabilitation clinics, outpatient surgical care operators, nursing homes and other health care companies. Mr. Scrushy had been a respiratory therapist who spotted a niche in the health care market and utilized his entrepreneurial talents, marketing skills, and super salesmanship to set up and run what became the third largest publicly held company in Alabama. Eventually, HealthSouth became the largest provider of ambulatory surgery and rehabilitative health care services in the United States with 1,700 facilities and 51,000 employees. In 2003, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) accused the company and Mr. Scrushy of inflating earnings to the tune of $1.4 billion since 1999. In November 2003, a federal grand jury indicted Mr. Scrushy on 85 counts including conspiracy, securities fraud, money laundering and charges related to overstating HealthSouth’s earnings by nearly $3.0 billion. According to federal investigators, the company overstated earnings to meet analysts’ earning estimates, while hiding the accounting fraud from the auditors. However, questions were raised whether the auditors failed to find or simply overlooked the fraud at HealthSouth.
Central to the investigation was the issue of what role Mr. Scrushy played in “cooking the books.” However, as the case unfolded, it highlighted many other issues such as: The role of Board of Directors in corporate governance; the role of the auditors; the effect of conflict of interest between an accounting firm and its consulting arm on auditing; whether the relationship between an investment bank and a company affects the quality of the bank’s research reports on the company; whether the executive