Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 ACC/561 Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 Following a number of discovered fraud scandals committed by well-known corporations and in order to restore public confidence in the stock market and trading of securities, the United States congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the year 2002. As a result of the act endorsement by the New York Stock Exchange and the Securities and Exchange Commission, among many other national overseeing committees, a number of rules and regulations were proposed and adopted and that demanded new processes and programs be instilled for ensuring compliance with the requirements of the new law. The new rules and regulations pertaining to the enacted law have a common goal: 1. Pass …show more content…
Fraud via false financial reporting falls in four categories: 1. Fraudulent financial reporting – reporting false financial performance and overstating the company’s earnings and falsifying the level of liabilities to attract investor’s contributions. 2. Misappropriation of assets – where high level personnel utilize illegal schemes to benefit self by the use of cooking financial records, embezzlement, and theft of employee’s retirement accounts. 3. Avoiding paying for costs and expenses while acquiring assets and revenues fraudulently – this takes place in the form of avoiding paying taxes on all of the company’s earning’s and where the company liquidates an employee’s pension account and distributes the proceeds among the board members and upper management in the form of performance bonuses. 4. Expenditures associated with unethical and improper purposes – this type for fraud includes the use of bribery or improper payment schemes to attain financial gain or business awards that the company may not have been able to achieve using proper business practices. Anti-fraud programs are now implemented under the Sarbanes-Oxley by all companies registered to conduct business in the United States. Such programs are closely monitored, evaluated and audited annually by the regulatory agencies to ensure and enforce compliance with the law. Although most companies already employ some form of
The company’s revenues were not growing fast enough to meet these targets, so defendants instead resorted to improperly eliminating and deferring current period expenses to inflate earnings. They employed a multitude of imp roper accounting practices to achieve this objective. Among other things; the complaint charges that defendants:
Throughout history and in our own time, legitimate accounting methods have been utilized to fraudulently engage in manipulating activities that results in illicit gains to the perpetrators and losses to individuals and financial institutions.
Fraudulent financial reporting is one form of corporate corruption and may involve the manipulation of the documents used to record accounting transactions, the misrepresentation of accounting events or transactions, or the intentional misapplication of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) (Crumbley, Heitger, and Smith, 2013). Examples of fraudulent schemes befitting of this category abound and usually involve financial statement items that have been misclassified, omitted, overstated, undervalued, or prematurely recognized. One case involving CEO Bill Smith of Moonstay
A major impetus behind the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was deliberate financial statement fraud. When committed on a large scale, billions of dollars can be lost and investor confidence in financial market will be reduced. Evidence suggests that the incidence of fraud has declined relative to the pre-SOX era. This can only be interpreted as suggesting that SOX
The Securities Act of 1933 regulated the securities and the accounting standards before the Sarbanes Oxley Act was passed. Under the Securities Act, corporations and their investments bank were legally responsible for telling the truth and making sure the financial statements were audited correctly. Although corporations were responsible, the CEOs were not which was meant it was hard to prosecute them for fraud. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act was enacted in response to a series of high profile financial scandals that occurred in the early 2000s at companies including Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco that rattled investor confidence. The Sarbanes Oxley Act was named after
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 was signed into law on July 30, 2002 by President Bush. The new law came after major corporate scandals involving Enron, Arthur Anderson, WorldCom. Its goals are to protect investors by improving accuracy of and reliability of corporate disclosures and to restore investor confidence. The law is considered the most important change in securities and corporate law since the New Deal. The act is named after Senator Paul Sarbanes of Maryland and Representative Michael Oxley of Ohio (Wikipedia Online).
In fraud committed against organizations, the victim of fraud is the employee’s organization. In frauds committed on behalf of an organization, executives usually are involved in some type of financial statement fraud; typically, to make the company’s reported financial results appear better than they actually are. In this second case, the victims are investors in the company’s stock. A third way to classify frauds is via the use of the ACFE’s occupational fraud definition, “the use of one’s occupation for personnel enrichment through the deliberate misuse or misapplication of the employing organization’s resources or assets” (ACFE, 2010). The ACFE includes three major categories of occupational fraud: asset misappropriations involves the theft or misuse of the organization’s assets, corruption involves the wrongful use of influence in a business transaction in order to procure benefits contrary to their duty to their employer, and fraudulent financial statements involving falsification of an organization’s financial statements for personal gain.
Bribery – it’s a form of corruption. This is the straightforward use of financial muscle to gain unfair advantage over others. An example would be attempting to gain planning permission by giving
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act was devised and designed to protect shareholders, as well as the public, from errors in corporate accounting and fraudulent business practices. All publicly traded companies, no matter their size, are required to comply with the terms of the Act. The Act was not only created to regulate corporate business practices, but also was created with the intention to help gain back the public’s trust in large, publicly traded corporations. The Act helps the Security Exchange Commission (SEC) in regulating companies and making sure these
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act was passes in 2002 in response to a handful of large corporate scandals that occurred between the years 2000 to 2002, resulting in the losses of billions of dollars by investors. Enron, Worldcom and Tyco are probably the most well known companies that were involved in these scandals, but there were a number of other companies guilty of such things as well. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act was passed as a way to crackdown on corporations by setting new and improved standards that all United States’ public companies and accounting firms were and are required to abide by. It also works to hold top level executives accountable for the company, and if fraudulent behaviors are discovered then the executives could find themselves in hot water. The punishments for such fraudulence could be as serious as 20 years jail time. (Sarbanes-Oxley Act, 2014). The primary motivation for the act was to prevent future scandals from happening, or at least, make it much more difficult for them to happen. The act was also passed largely to protect the people—the shareholders—from corporations, their executives, and their boards of directors. Critics tend to argue that the act is to complicated, and costs to much to abide by, leading to the United States losing its “competitive edge” in the global marketplace (Sarbanes-Oxley Act, 2014). The Sarbanes-Oxley act, like most things, has its pros and cons. It is costly; studies have shown that this act has cost companies millions of
Over the years Congress has acknowledged and agreed that more needs to be done to incentivize and protect whistleblowers. In the early 2000s, following major accounting scandals, Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (“SOX”). Then several years later, following more major financial scandals and plummeting of the United States economy into the Great Recession of 2008, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Act. This section will briefly describe each of these Acts as they provide background for the dispute.
This subject company in this case study is WoolEx Mills. The top management team at the Mills had to act fast to prevent the accusations charged upon them, so that they may venture deep into the United States market. In the process, they had to act in a way that will present the company’s financial statements; cash flows in a way that they did not show any suspicious fraudulent activities. The type of fraud in this case study is known as manipulation of accounts which involves the act of offering the accounts in the way they are not in reality.
Fraud is defined as a deliberate misrepresentation that causes a person or business to suffer damages, often in the form of monetary losses through deception or concealment. And Occupational Fraud as defined by the ACFE is the use of one’s occupation for personal enrichment through the deliberate misuse or misapplication of the employing organization’s resources or assets. Traditional fraud triangle theory by Donald Cressey explains that propensity of fraud occurring in an organization lies on three critical elements which are Pressure, Opportunity, and Rationalization.
Financial statement fraud is usually a means to an end rather than an end in itself. When people "cook the books" they may doing it to "buy more time" to quietly fix business problems that prevent their entities from achieving its expected earnings or complying with loan covenants (Fraud Magazine, 2014. It may also be done to obtain or renew financing that would not be granted or would be smaller if honest financial statements were provided. People intent on profiting from crime may commit financial statement fraud to obtain loans they can then siphon off for personal gain or to inflate the price of the company 's shares, allowing them to sell their holdings or exercise stock options at a profit (Fraud Magazine, 2014). However, in many past cases of financial statement fraud, the perpetrators have gained little or nothing personally in financial terms. Instead the focus appears to have been preserving their status as leaders of the entity - a status that might have been lost
Over the past two years, corporate America has endured a plethora of fraudulent acts committed by those of high status within their respective corporations, most of which involve internal fraud. Internal fraud has two main aspects, misappropriation of assets and fraudulent financial reporting, with the focus of this discussion lying within the former. Misappropriation of assets is defined as fraud for personal gain. It is the most common type of fraud found among employees and frequently includes theft of cash and inventory.