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Effect of Behavior Article

ACC/291

April 25, 2012

Effect of Unethical Behavior Article Analysis

The Sarbanes-Oxley act was created in 2002 and was put in place because their needed to be some guidelines in accounting to prevent fraudulent activities from occurring. In the 1990’s businesses would create false financial statements in hopes to raise their stock prices to get more investors. The most notable company to crash was Enron, followed by Global Crossing which is the parent of MCI, and Xerox; later, almost one thousand publicly traded companies restated their financial statements. This resulted in almost $6 trillion of stock market value disappearing (Cunningham, 2003). I decided to do more research to see how many scandals such as these have occurred over the years before the act was created. Phar-Mor Scandal was a popular chain of drugstores in the 90’s. They were accused of mail fraud, embezzlement, bank fraud and transportation of funds received from theft or fraud.

Once these illegal activities were discovered, it eventually leads to bankruptcy and over 5,000 employees out of work. Another Scandal happened with the Lehman Brothers Holding Inc, a financial service firm. This scandal began to take place in early 2000’s and was discovered in 2011. This company was caught hiding a debt of 155 billion in bonds and a debt of 639 billion of assets. The company also failed to let their investors know of their financial situation and transactions. The Lehman Brothers Holding Inc. scandal came as a surprise to me because I thought that putting the Sarbanes-Oxley act in place would act as a deterrent from people trying to scam people whether it’s their clients or customers, employees, or investors out of their money but it seems that it hasn’t.

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