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The accounting scandals that have rocked the United States in recent years continue to raise profound questions on the viability of the rules and structures put in place to enforce compliance with international accounting standards.
Although the 2001 Enron debacle is possibly the biggest high-profile scandal to be reported in history, other corporations such as Tyco, Quest, Adelphia and WorldCom have had their share of corporate and accounting scandals, involving the rigging of accounting records to inflate profits, insider trading to enhance stock sales, fake bankruptcy claims, and excessive executive compensation (Champlin & Knoedler, 2003).
This paper assesses some enforcement strategies that continue to be employed to deal with accounting scandals. In 2002, Quest Communications, Inc. was accused of involvement in accounting scandals associated with “hollow swaps” and insider trading irregularities, and was fined $250 million by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) (Giroux, 2008).
To deal with this and other accounting scandals, the SEC and other regulating agencies have developed various enforcement strategies aimed at ensuring companies adhere to healthy accounting practices. These strategies are illuminated as follows.
It is a well known fact that funding for the SEC has been substantially increased in recent years to provide the oversight body with excellent capabilities to undertake constant reviews in corporations suspected of unethical accounting practices.
The funding has coincided with expanding regulatory powers for the SEC as well as expanded auditor responsibilities to ensure agencies are able to focus on significant cases that will have a momentous impact (Giroux, 2008). The SEC new whistleblower program, mandated by the Dodd-Frank Act, has been instrumental in ensuring enforcement of rules and structures aimed at ensuring that accounting scandals will no longer be a threat to the country’s economic stability.
In particular, this program now ensures that corporate insiders have “…a financial incentive to report fraud and accounting manipulation outside of their company instead [of] waiting for it to be resolved quietly inside” (Eaton & Akers, 2007 p. 69). Today, individuals who act as whistleblowers are protected from employer-related adverse retaliation and persecution, not mentioning that the SEC has installed a fully functional Office of the Whistleblower to deal with the payment of monetary awards to qualifying whistleblowers (U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission, 2012).
The SEC, in collaboration with other agencies, has “…developed formal agreements, similar to those used by criminal law enforcement authorities, to secure the cooperation of persons who are on the inside or otherwise aware of organizations engaged in fraudulent activity” (U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission, 2012 para. 4).
Not only do these cooperation contracts posses the capability to guarantee the accessibility of witnesses and information preceding the commencement of investigations, hence facilitating the agency to assemble stronger cases more quickly and efficiently, but they also act to guarantee a possible attenuation in penalties for insiders who provide objective evidence and consent to cooperate and testify.
Moving on, the SEC is continuously engaged in improving risk assessment capabilities, with the view to enhance its risk assessment procedures and approaches to better identify critical areas of risk and promote the viability and objectivity of information provided by companies to their shareholders and other regulatory bodies (U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission, 2012).
In most instances, these capabilities are used in concurrence with risk-based examinations of companies to select firms for possible assessment based on specific risk characteristics (Giroux, 2008). Other enforcement strategies include strengthening internal control mechanisms, undertaking constant corporate governance changes, and recruiting staff with specialized skills and experience (U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission, 2012).
References
Champlin, D.P., & Knoedler, J.T. (2003). Corporations, workers and the public interest. Journal of Economic Issues, 37(2), 305-312.
Eaton, T.V., & Akers, M.D. (2007). Whistle blowing and good governance. CPA Journal, 77(6), 66-71.
Giroux, G. (2008). What went wrong? Accounting fraud and lessons from recent scandals. Social Research, 75(4), 1205-1238.
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. (2012). The Securities and Exchange Commission post-Madoff reforms. Web.
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