and Sullivan wanted them to release $828 million of line accruals into the income statement. Besides that, the internal audit was primarily exist to measure business unit performance and enforce spending controls, whereas the external auditors, Arthur Andersen, was an independent auditors which performed the financial audits to access the reliability and integrity of the publicly reported financial information. Cynthia Cooper, the head of internal audit, had brought an issue related to a transaction
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On March 5, 2002, the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics convened a panel of four Santa Clara University business ethicists to discuss the Enron scandal. Panelists included Kirk O. Hanson, executive director of the Ethics Center and University Professor of Organizations and Society; Manuel Velasquez, Dirksen Professor of Business Ethics, Department of Management; Dennis Moberg, Wilkinson Professor of Management and Ethics, and Martin Calkins, S.J., assistant professor of management. Edited excerpts
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governance, accounting abuses, and outright greed. But none of these other companies had senior executives as colorful and likable as Bernie Ebbers. A Canadian by birth, the 6 foot, 3 inch former basketball coach and Sunday School teacher emerged from the collapse of WorldCom not only broke but with a personal net worth as a negative nine-digit number.2 No palace in a gated community, no stable of racehorses or multi-million dollar yacht to show for the telecommunications giant he created. Only debts and red
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Chapter 2 THE AUDIT MARKET Revision: 11 September 2012 2.1 Learning Objectives After studying this chapter, you should be able to: 1. Distinguish between different theories of audit services including agency theory. 2. Understand drivers for audit regulation. 3. Understand the role of public oversight. 4. Distinguish between different audit firms. 5. Identify some current developments in the audit market. 6. Portray the series of industry codes of conduct and guidance 2.2 Introduction
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How does a scandal affect the business environment and the society? This article will explain just those questions by analyzing a “famous” fraud scandal: WorldCom Inc. The article discusses the chronology of events that lead to the WorldCom Inc. collapse and explains how the figures were manipulated for the owners’ interest and what the accounting scam was. The article ends with the consequences of the scandal and what the effects were on the society and business environment in general. JEL
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governance, accounting abuses, and outright greed. But none of these other companies had senior executives as colorful and likable as Bernie Ebbers. A Canadian by birth, the 6 foot, 3 inch former basketball coach and Sunday School teacher emerged from the collapse of WorldCom not only broke but with a personal net worth as a negative nine-digit number.2 No palace in a gated community, no stable of racehorses or multi-million dollar yacht to show for the telecommunications giant he created; only debts and red
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Chapter 2 Literature Review 2.0 Introduction The quality of the audited report is an important and basic aspect for ensuring the credibility of the financial statements to those related parties such as investors, creditors (Shafie, et al., 2009). Generally speaking, this will not appear if auditors are not independence. The whole audit progress would be argued that the auditor had given the bias opinion to the client if there was no independence. Therefore, the accounting profession such
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are understated and performance ratios such as return on investment are overstated. In addition, financial risk measures are not accurate and useful (‘bear no relation to reality’). Off-balance sheet items attracted attention at the time of the collapse of Enron in the USA in 2001. A report by the SEC in 2005 estimated that US companies were committed to US$1.25 trillion in lease payments relating to leases which did not appear on balance sheet. The author estimates that 90% of Australian leases
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a contract in the quarter the deal was made. What also became clear was that Enron did not accomplish their gross manipulations without the help from their accountant’s at Arthur Andersen. Enron shareholders and executives were not the only groups negatively affected by Enron’s aggressive accounting practices. Arthur Andersen was also unraveled because of the role it played in Enron’s materially misstated financial statements. In a letter to Kenneth Lay (, Enron’s CEO before and after Jeffrey Skilling’s
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The Enron Collapse Enron, a high profile organization which ranked as the seventh largest company in the United States during the 1990’s consisted of approximately 25,000 employees worldwide and held revenues in the tune of over 100 billion dollars in 2000. Enron controlled about one quarter of the gas companies in the United States and also expanded into Myriad energy products during its years of operation. The company traded hundreds of products throughout the wider Continentals including South
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