Preview

Ethics of Penn Square and Dow Corning

Better Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1644 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Ethics of Penn Square and Dow Corning
Ethics of Penn Square and Dow Corning

Ethics of Penn Square Bank and the Dow Corning Bankruptcy Penn Square Bank: What were the ethical pressures on the firm concerning documentation, credit extension, and revenue recognition that lead to the final collapse? What should have been done to reduce or offset these pressures?

Penn Square Bank was a small commercial bank in Oklahoma City which made high-risk financial loans during the late 1970s in the oil boom. The bank ultimately collapsed during the early 1980s due to their financing practices. The bank was overestimating and valuing its customer’s gas and oil reserves that let at that time to fund a bigger credit line. In addition, the bank didn't request clients to complete proper loan paperwork or proper security to back the financial loans. Penn Square bank utilized their links with bigger banks all over the United States of America to offer the loans to them, and became a middle-man of types and was earning money from the loan application charges and loan administration charges charged to the big out of state banks.
By 1981 a fiscal downturn slowed down the interest in oil and Penn Square became the focus of bank investigators (Caskey, 1985). During the investigation, they found out that the borrowers were not making their interest payments on their personal lines of credit nor were the vast majority of borrowers in a position to payback their financial loans. Also, the financial loans were approved on the value of the security as opposed to the borrower’s capability to pay back the debt. Rumors started to flow concerning the banks problems that triggered a run on the bank and compelled Penn Square to depend on brokered money (Caskey, 1985). Authorities required that Penn Square raise additional capital to pay for the unsecured loans in their portfolio but eventually they couldn't. Their practices triggered Seattle First National Bank to have losses that surpassed their capital, as well as the

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Powerful Essays

    Credit Mobilier Scandal

    • 1977 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Hoops, Roy. "It Was Bad Last Time Too: The Credit Mobilier Scandal of 1872. " American Heritage. Vol. 42, February/ March 1991. New York: Forbes Inc, 1991.…

    • 1977 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    ACC 557 Entire Course

    • 350 Words
    • 3 Pages

    ACC 557 Week 4 Individual Assignment Ethics of Penn Square Bank and the Dow Corning Bankruptcy.doc…

    • 350 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Lori Widgot vs Wells Fargo

    • 8618 Words
    • 35 Pages

    Law, business ethics and social responsibility combine to act as a compliance system requiring businesses and employees to act responsibly in society. (Griseri & Seppala, 2010). These fundamental factors have been widely displayed in the legal case of Lori Wigod (hereby referred to as Wigod) vs. Wells Fargo where the plaintiff, Wigod, alleges the defendant, Wells Fargo, of breaching a contract to permanently modify her home loan through the use of a grant. The purpose of this paper is to further analyze the Wells Fargo case and determine whether they followed the law, behaved ethically and was socially responsible while applying these three values of business.…

    • 8618 Words
    • 35 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    JPMorgan Chase is one of the oldest and most respected banks in the United States. However, during the summer of 2012 Chase announced trading losses and bad investment decisions that resulted in a loss of approximately $5.8 billion. Not only did they report this substantial loss they admitted to falsifying their first quarter reports, were they where attempting to conceal the massive loss. Three months prior to this event JPMorgan Chase was viewed as the top American bank. The first question to be discussed in this paper will be what actions can Administrative Agencies such the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and…

    • 1667 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    The Sarbanes-Oxley Act

    • 1677 Words
    • 7 Pages

    Enron’s failure spotlighted corporate America’s moral failures and tremendously injured those that condoned and benefited from the unethical practices. This failure resulted in a major overhaul of accountability guidelines of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. Code of Ethics was promulgated along with other support mechanisms that monitor a company’s ethics program that extends to the core values of company management and personnel. Of the five components of ethical behavior, honesty is perhaps the most complex and difficult to implement since the ultimate decision to disclose information to the public relies mostly on the individual’s ethical values or interpretations that can be manipulated to produce a desired…

    • 1677 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Following the SEC’s inability to control Wall Street fraud, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission received sharp criticism from the public for its seemingly weak enforcement of Wall Street’s too big to fail banks. Many believe that the agency is unethically protecting Wall Street fraud due to the incident in 2010 when the National Archives had contacted the SEC expressing concern that an unauthorized destruction of federal records had…

    • 864 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Loan officers visited people’s homes demanding payment be given in full in gold or silver. The state banks then called in their loans and the national economy collapsed. “Hundreds of employers all around the nation, unable to borrow money to pay their bills, went out of business. In urban centers like Philadelphia, unemployment reached 75 percent of the working force, and several thousand workers were imprisoned for their unpaid debts.” (D-2)…

    • 451 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    The attacks on America’s banks began immediately following the stock market crash of 1929. Quickly overnight, thousands of people began to withdraw their deposits from the bank. With no money to give back to the people, and loans were given to farms and businesses which eventually all went out and the American banking crisis began. The American banking crisis of 1933…

    • 717 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    It is not unusual for businesses to fail after making bad or ill-timed investments. What turned the Enron case into a major financial scandal was the company’s response to its problems. Rather than disclose its true condition to public investors, as the law requires, Enron falsified its accounts. It assigned business losses and near-worthless assets to unconsolidated partnerships and “special purpose…

    • 1082 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Case Study Aig

    • 914 Words
    • 4 Pages

    American International Group, Inc. (AIG) reported bogus transactions that hid losses and inflated its net worth. AIG inflated reserve funds that were to be used for paying claims by millions of dollars and that AIG's CEO Maurice Greenberg repeatedly directed AIG traders late in the day to buy AIG shares to prop up its price. However, aside from AIG’s corporate financial reporting errors or outright fraud, the companies ethical culture begin to fail because the company seemed to have a decentralized organization. A mix of Individual divisions and departments recklessness and power to define their own corporate governance, and a CEO who was secretive and manipulated the numbers, all were a formula for an unethical corporate culture.…

    • 914 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    The Panic Of 1907

    • 494 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Even though this financial panic was huge, it might actually have gone even further, had it not been for the involvement of J. P. Morgan. Morgan was a financer who pledged large amounts of his own money, in addition to convincing other New York bankers to do the same, with…

    • 494 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    The Enron's Ethics Breakdown

    • 2754 Words
    • 12 Pages

    It is perhaps the most compelling business ethics case in a generation—a textbook version of what can go wrong in an organization that lacks a true culture of ethical compliance. Investors and the media once considered Enron to be the company of the future, but as its demise suggests, it was in reality not a particularly modern business organization, especially in its approach to ethics. On the surface, at least, it appeared to reject progressive innovation in governance and ethics programs and instead sought to circumvent systems that were designed to protect the company and its shareholders. The purpose of this report is not to comment on the legal or political ramifications of the case but rather to focus on the business ethics issues raised by the conduct of the company’s directors and officers, its accountants, and lawyers as it is known to date. It is meant to be a reminder that simply having a detailed code of ethics on the books (as Enron certainly did) is not enough. Organizations need to infuse ethics and integrity throughout their corporate culture as well as into their definition of success.…

    • 2754 Words
    • 12 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Business ethics is an area of ethics that examines ethical rules and principles within a commercial perspective using cases such as: Accounting Irregularities at WorldCom and Arthur Andersen…No More: What Went Wrong? (Business Ethics 4th Ed: Cases 5 & 6 pg.101-109), both clearly present various moral and ethical problems that arise that are real life business scenarios as well as question the impact of certain ‘special’ duties/obligations that apply to particular individuals and employees who choose to engage in these activities in the organization leading to their downfall. The WorldCom case and scandal occurred because accountants as well as former CEO Bernie Ebbers and Scott Sullivan failed to live the virtues of accountancy as well as failed to adhere to the moral principles and ideals of their profession and further analysis reveals the ways in which these irregular accounting practices were carried out along with the consequences and charges laid by investigators such as conspiracy, fraud and many false claims regarding their accounts and profitability. The Arthur Andersen…No More: What Went Wrong? case is another scenario where a series of unethical accounting practices resulted in the firm’s decline and the role they played in the accounting fraud at Enron. The way in which these corrupt practices took place is an obvious indication of the culture of the organization and the moral standings of employees, close relationships which affected both the company and clients such as Enron.…

    • 4546 Words
    • 12 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    How a company conducts business is important. The U.S. Security and Exchange commission has established guidelines for publicly traded companies so investors and creditors have easy access to the information they need to evaluate the risk to invest or extend credit to a company (Kimmel, Weygandt, & Kieso, 2007). In this paper Hewlett Packard’s ethics policy, U.S. Security and Exchange compliance, financial ratios reported in their 2006 and 2007 annual reports, and filing with the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission are examined.…

    • 1709 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Best Essays

    up as a consequence of lost confidence within the financial system. Banks were not willing to lend…

    • 2705 Words
    • 11 Pages
    Best Essays