Order Code RS21253 Updated August 29, 2002 CRS Report for Congress Received through the CRS Web WorldCom: The Accounting Scandal Bob Lyke Specialist in Social Legislation Domestic Social Policy Division Mark Jickling Specialist in Public Finance Government and Finance Division Summary On June 25, 2002, WorldCom, the Nation’s second largest long distance telecommunications company, announced that it had overstated earnings in 2001 and the first quarter of 2002 by more than $3.8 billion
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(Sachdev, n. p.). Also during 2002, the telecommunications firm WorldCom was found guilty of fraud as a result of having “improperly accounted for more than $3.8 billion of expenses” (Klein, 2002, p. 1). Other companies too, such as Tyco, Qwest, and Adelphia Communications, all became involved in accounting- related scandals. These various scandals had a negative impact on public views regarding the accounting profession. As stated in an article in the CPA Letter, the high-profile business failures
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CHAPTER 2 CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK UNDERLYING FINANCIAL ACCOUNTING Show Me the Earnings! The growth of new-economy business on the Internet has led to the development of new measures of performance. When Priceline.com splashed onto the dot-com scene, it touted steady growth in a measure called “unique offers by users” to explain its heady stock price. To draw investors to its stock, Drugstore.com focused on the number of “unique customers” at its website. After all, new businesses call for new performance
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Effectively Compensation Through Collective Bargaining Devita R. Ewell Compensation can be accurately defined as something, or a sort of payment, that is generally given or received, in return for a service rendered, or for any other reason. There are several different types of compensation, and one example is ‘worker’s compensation’, wherein the government forms a sort of state sponsored insurance for the workers of the state, which would provide benefits to the workers in case the
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Sarbanes-Oxley In Week 1 we studied the general importance of the "rules of the game" (property rights and the rule of law) to a well-functioning economy. This week, we focused in more closely on the "rules of the game" regarding corporate governance and financial reporting. The Week 6 topic of fraudulent financial reporting relates to corporate top management that enriches itself and abandons its obligations to shareholders, employees, creditors, government, and the general public. The Agency
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control is regulated by government, some objections to government regulation of internal control, and why these criticisms are unwarranted. By July of 2002 Americans had been plagued by a flood of corporate scandal. The names: Enron, World Com, Adelphia and Arthur Anderson will forever be burned into our history books as those infamous corporations that ruined the lives of millions of people. Their jobs were lost, their pensions disappeared and many lost their homes. The bankruptcies of these
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Developing an Ethical Business Environment: A Report to Executive Management Introduction Ethics and business rules always go together. The fact that business policing is based upon the different measures of complete recognition of social norms and social limitations, ethics is indeed a large part of the ways by which business organizations try to strive to be able to become more effective within their operational engagements with regards their aim of being able to influence the society as well
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Preamble When we think of corporations today we consider them to be responsible, thanks to CEO's and business advocates portraying it to be so. This concept of believing in corporate goodness is naïve. The cases involving Enron and WorldCom prove just that. This leads us to the taboos in corporate social responsibility discourse. These taboos are rarely discussed, yet it is a very important topic. According to Berger and Luckmann, "from the social constructionist's perspective, social reality
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9-110-045 REV: MARCH 31, 2011 EUGENE SOLTES A Letter from Prison On February 14, 2008, Stephen Richards, inmate #71320-053 at Taft Federal Correctional Institution, completed a letter to Eugene Soltes, a student at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Richards was the former global head of sales at Computer Associates. Exhibit 1 provides the list of questions Soltes asked Richards. Exhibit 2 is a copy of the letter Soltes received in return. __________________________
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Table of Contents Abstract 3 Introduction 4 Importance of Transparency 7 What Regulation Typically Covers 7 Regulatory Agencies 8 Accounting Reform 10 Conclusion 13 References 15 Abstract Within the accounting profession there are many complex ethical issues that must be dealt with quite often. It is important that the people working within the industry provide high quality financial statements and always pay close attention to ethical concerns that may arise
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