Accounting Scandals Before The Turn Of The Century

Just before the turn of the century and shortly afterward, the financial world saw some of the biggest corporate accounting scandals of all time. Corporate giants like Waste Management (1998), Enron (2001), and Tyco (2002) were all caught in the unethical practice of generating fictitious financial statements. All these companies did this buy using fraudulent accounting entries. Assets were inflated, sales numbers were inflated and huge debts were omitted from balance sheets. Another company that used accounting to put out fraudulent financial statements was Worldcom. Being the largest accounting scandal in American History at the time of its exposure, the Worldcom scandal cost 30,000 workers their jobs and investors over $180 billion.