Attempting to satisfy their political masters in a target-driven culture, Soviet managers had to optimize on many margins simultaneously. One of these was the margin of truthfulness. False accounting for the value of production was apparently widespread in some branches of the economy and at...

This paper examines the largest corporate fraud in India at Satyam Computer Services Ltd. This fiasco occurred in January 2009 when Mr. Ramalinga Raju, the Chairman, confessed to an extensive accounting fraud that was ongoing for at least seven years. Since then, a large number of articles have...

Accounting statements keep by the key source for processing financial analyses of enterprises. The healthy enterprise should have been able to load the object of her activities, to reach constantly required measurement estimation of the contribution of capital for investors, with thinking about...

In this paper we look at business ethics from a deontological perspective. We address the theory of ethical decision-making and deontological ethics for business executives and explore the concept of “moral dutyâ€\x9D as transcending mere gain and profit maximization. Two real-world...

We analyze corporate fraud in a model where managers have superior information but, due to private benefits from empire building, are biased against liquidation. This may induce them to misreport information and even bribe auditors when liquidation would be value-increasing. To restrain fraud,...

According to some of the earliest printed expositions of bookkeeping and accounts, a businessman might keep two ledgers pertaining to the same set of transactions. The second ledger could be an exact copy of the original ledger, to be available if the latter were lost or destroyed. Or, one of...

We study financial reporting and corporate governance in 216 U.S. companies accused of price fixing by antitrust authorities. We document a range of strategies used by these firms when reporting financial results, including frequent earnings smoothing, segment reclassification, and restatements....

This paper puts under the magnifying glass the path to failure of Sunbeam Corp. and emphasizes the reasons of its singularity and exceptionality. This corporate case emerges as an outlier from the analysis of the US fraud cases mentioned by WebBRD: the consideration of the time between fraud...

This study examines accounting fraud in relation to the characteristics of company executives. The study portrays the degree to which company as well as personal motives could urge an executive to commit fraud. Subsequently, we attempt to identify the degree to which certain socio-economic...