WorldCom was the second largest telecommunications corporation in the United States. After thriving in a multi-million dollar business they were forced to close their doors. The reason were practices unethical and fraudulent activities which lead to exposing the business. WorldCom was one of the largest accounting fraud scandals in corporate history. WorldCom had to file for bankruptcy after the organization admitted to accounting fraud. How this came up was a long and drawn out investigation. In the financial statements determined that the auditor was right about that the corporation was making false transactions that could not be determined what or how they go the amounts from. From the investigation that the auditors discovered $11 billion dollars that was fraudulent transactions.…
WorldCom was one of the largest telecom companies in the world during 1996 to 2002. The company helped to grow a small regional company that bought and re-sold long distance in the South into an international behemoth that operated in over 65 countries. However, in 2002, the senior management and employees perpetrated a massive fraud, and in June, WorldCom announced that it had “misstated” its financial statements over the last five quarters by $3.8 billion. After coming out this scandal, WorldCom went bankrupt…
If WorldCom would have created a working culture full of honesty, positive work environment, openness, and assistance there would have never been any fraud. Instead they created an aggressive, individualistic, and competitive culture. Efforts that were made to establish a corporate Code of Conduct received Ebbers disapproval; he described the Code as a “colossal waste of time”. The consistent pressure from management created an aggressive and competitive culture that didn’t contain any communication, honesty, truthfulness, or ethics within the company. Ebbers also created an individualistic culture where the boss was to not be questioned. All this…
WorldCom was one of the leading telecommunication companies prior to its application for bankruptcy protection on July 21st, 2002. The firm’s decision to file for bankruptcy was a shocker move considering the amount of revenues and asset base the company had. It is believed that the firm was highly involved in fraudulent bookkeeping between the year 1999 and 2000 where they had managed to overstate its taxable income by at least $7 billion. It was also revealed that the company had committed itself to maintaining an earning to expense ratio which was relatively high. Therefore, the firm had a self-imposed high target which became relatively difficult to achieve over time owing to shrinking revenues. In the early years of the 1990s, the firm…
As the case of Excello Telecommunications is reviewed it can be seen that the CFO was facing financial difficulties due to increased competition. In 2010 the earnings estimate was not going to be met and this would have affected the bonuses, stock options, and the share prices of the Excello stocks. After discovering a large sale that was pending until the shipment could be made for the following year the CFO asked the company controller to find a way to capitalize on the sale in the current year so that the budget shortfall could be met. The only way to accomplish the task was to work around the rules of accounting. The intent to find a way around the rules presents possible legal issues. This case can be evaluated by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the AICPA and we look at the financial reporting standards and ethics involved.…
This paper will define the corporate scandals of the past decade using Enron and their auditors Arthur Andersen as a case study. The paper will focus on the financial statement misrepresentation involving Enron and their auditors. The paper will further define the effects that these scandals…
1. Prior to 2002, the U.S. government had very little oversight of the financial practices and corporate governance of public companies and accounting firms. Corporate investors, to include banks, and public company employees took for granted that public companies they invested in or worked for operated ethically in regards to their financial practices. However, this blind faith offered little protection and had devastating consequences for those investors and employees of such powerhouse companies like Enron and WorldCom that went bankrupt without ever publicizing financial hard times. How could this ever happen? According to Horngren, Harrison Jr., and Oliver (2010), both Enron and WorldCom overstated profits, but WorldCom took it a step further by reporting expenses as assets (p. 380).…
The authors of the article also conducted a study on whether or not fraud of the financial statements was in direct correlation of businesses filing bankruptcy (Nogler & Inwon, 2011, p. 68) like in the cases of Enron and WorldCom. The results found that the larger the company that filed bankruptcy the more likely that securities fraud litigation and general overstatement of the revenue and assets of the company occurred (Nogler & Inwon, 2011).…
The Scandal cause by Ebbers ultimately produced the ultimate demise and bankruptcy of the WorldCom Inc. Corporation. The accounting scandal comprised the sum of eleven million dollars, which in turn resulted in the decreased value to the investors. Mr. Ebbers created…
Li, Y. (2010). The Case Analysis of the Scandal of Enron. International journal of business and…
This postscript will update the WorldCom story by focusing on what happened to the company after it declared bankruptcy and before it was acquired by Verizon. The postscript also will relate subsequent important events in the telecommunications industry, the effect of WorldCom's problems on its competitors and labor market, and the impact WorldCom had on the lives of the key players associated with the fraud and its exposure.…
The “crisis of credibility” largely arose from the number of companies that restated their previously issued financial statements as a result of accounting irregularities and fraud. Especially responsible were the very visible Enron and WorldCom fraud cases. Both companies filed for bankruptcy and constituted the largest companies in American history to do so. The extent of the accounting irregularities and fraud being investigated and disclosed brought into question the effectiveness of financial statement audits. In addition, the criminal conviction of Arthur Andersen, LLP, one of the then Big 5 accounting firms, on charges of destroying documents related to the Enron case brought into question the ethical standards of the profession.…
In chapter 7 we discussed how to make inferences about a population parameter based on a sample statistic. While this can be useful, it has severe limitations. In Chapter 8, we expand our toolbox to include Confidence Intervals. Instead of basing our inference on a single value, a point estimate, a Confidence Interval provides a range of values, an interval, which – at a certain level of confidence (90%, 95%, etc.) – contains the true population parameter. Having a range of values to make inferences about the population provides much more room for accuracy than making an inference off of only one value.…
In 2001, Enron, one of America’s leading energy companies, disappeared overnight. At its height, Enron had “a stock price over $90...a marker value of 70 billion… [and] gigantic executive compensation incentive packages” (Giroux). After being exposed of unethical business and accounting methods, Enron eventually went bankrupt. Enron was convicted of fraud, money laundering, conspiracy, and over 50 other charges. The Enron Scandal is a watershed moment in accounting because of the exposure and reevaluation of faulty business administration and unethical business ethics, the creation of the President’s Corporate Fraud Task Force, and the creation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.…
Case 5 & 6 History :Accounting Irregularities at WorldComBernard J. (Bernie) Ebbers from the beginning “was a man who believed in himself and his company” a statement which was best expressed by the way in which he performed duties to his company. WorldCom thus, became the second largest telecommunications…