Case of Eileen Foster v. BofA and Countrywide The story starts March 7, 2007. Eileen Foster was promoted to Executive Vice President, Fraud Risk Management while she was working for the Countrywide Financial Corp. This role requires our whistleblower to supervise and monitor internal bank processes and mortgage fraud investigations, if needed, organize and send conclusion in the form of suspicious activity report to the U.S. Treasury as well as the board of directors. During her time, she learned that Full Spectrum Lending Division (FSL) managers in the Boston area were subject to several fraud allegations, she directed an investigation into the matter, found conclusive evidence of “egregious fraud”, including document and invoice forgery,…
Jack Abramoff was the top lobbyist in D.C. from 1994 to 2001 and was involved in arguably one of the largest scandals in American history. This scandal involved many other people and some main players were Michael Scanlon, Adam Kidan, Ralph Reed, Tom Delay, and Bob Ney. All of these people either received bribes, gave out bribes, or were involved in some other type of illegal activity. Abramoff’s scandal was based mainly around his lobbying work with the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and their interests in owning casinos and gambling. His first job in 1995 was to eliminate the bill that was charging an unrelated sales tax to the Native Americans casinos.…
Markus Fleenor [Upload on the Assignments Page as an attachment ] The test covers both the material in the text book as well as the Instructor’s Comments. Always give specific, historical examples to justify your arguments. Read and follow the directions for each question carefully.…
Academia: The following case is from the U.S. Department of Justice September 14th 2017 and involves a former Chicago, Illinois superintendent. According to the article Mr. Lawrence Wyllie, a 79 year old, who worked at Lincoln-Way Community High School, has been indicted for federal fraud. He has allegedly misappropriated school funds for his own benefit and concealing the district’s true financial deficit from the public. He is said to have fraudulently used at least $50,000 in school district funds to build a dog obedience training school.…
In a large company like Wells Fargo, checking employees every so often to ensure that they are fulfilling the quality and legality of their position is vital. Success of a company depends on the honesty and dedication put into it by its employees. Wells Fargo not only violated moral values, but also American laws. This white-collar crime will never be forgotten in American history if business values, laws, and policies continue to remain…
Jack Abramoff Jack Abramoff is a former lobbyist and businessman. He was convicted of mail fraud, conspiracy, bribing of public officials and tax evasion. Jack plead guilty to charges that aligned him with embezzling over eighty millions dollars. An act, that marks it as one of the biggest white collar crimes to date. Schmidt and Grimaldi the authors of The Challenge of Democracy have deemed it “the biggest congressional corruption scandal in generations” (Schmidt and Grimaldi 2005, A01).…
“Top officials at the Houston-based company cheated investors and enriched themselves through complex accounting gimmicks like overvaluing assets to boost cash flow and earnings statements, which made the company even more appealing to investors” (Famous Cases and Criminals). Agents conducted over 1,800 interviews, collected more than 3,000 boxes of evidence and more than four terabytes of digitized data, and seized more than $164 million. Their efforts resulted in the convictions of nearly all of Enron’s executive management team (Famous Cases and…
Political Authority in Second-Wave Civilizations Compared to other classical Eurasian empires, the Hellenistic Era, under Alexander the Great is superior to its contemporaries because of its size, the time it took to build, its diversity and adaptation to culture, and its style of government, the reverence of its subjects, and its legacy. Robert W. Strayer’s 2013 edition of Ways of the World provides evidence that compares and contrasts this empire with other regimes of the era to support this assertion. While it’s true that the Hellenistic empire was “founded and sustained at a great cost in human life,” and was divided shortly after Alexander’s death, it’s also true that Alexander’s Empire proliferated Greek “ideas, cultures, and values”…
After reviewing the LaRosa case, it is important to infer how a situation like this could have been prevented or detected early on. In chapter three of Financial Services Anti-Fraud Risk and Control Workbook, it gives examples of preventative techniques. First, to understand the weakness within an organization it is important to look at the red flags; the red flags can help show the vulnerabilities that a company has via a fraud risk assessment. The textbook mentions standard preventative techniques beginning with Anti- Fraud Policies. Policies are important to implement because the mold the mind-set of the employees.…
1) At Peregrine, the risk factors, especially those aligned with control environment factors and the “tone at the top” are discussed. The risks included having a paper based confirmation system for the entire business; no segregation of duties, which meant that only one or very few people were working on the financial statements, and in this case Mr. Wasendorf was the only one and had altered all bank documents using only Photoshop, excel, scanners, and printers. Continuing on, time off was not required at Peregrine, which could have ultimately discovered this fraud much earlier, by allowing someone else to sit in the absentee’s seat and review all of their work. Additionally, Peregrine lacked internal auditors or an audit committee at the time. The presence of the internal auditors could have decreased odds of misstatement incentives to commit fraud by management, called fraudulent financial reporting, and overseen…
Essay Outline White-collar crimes, although not discussed very often, are on rise. When one hears the word crime, they are inclined to think violence or an unethical abuse of some sort. However, people rarely take corporate crimes such as fraud, theft, forgery, or embezzlement into a higher regard, as they do not highly affect the common citizen personally. Studying these executive crimes is important to raise awareness of deceit within society, and to protect and prevent unethical practices from occurring. The latent impact of these white-collar crimes is the emotional trauma, blackmail, and loss of finances.…
Thus, we often see articles about how companies covered up their soon-to-be scandals, how companies assured citizens but ended up hurting the environment (chemical companies and their wastes), and fraud among executives like the ENRON scandal. The ENRON scandal was a big event in American economy history, because such large energy company was doing illegal practices, from the executives to employees, no one said anything before it was revealed. There must be employees who knew about the executives’ action and were against it, but because of loyalty and they were afraid to be fired, what they could have done was limited, and this is just one example among many. In result, to prevent such big problems from happening, companies must guide their members in an ethically way. As Daryl Koehn, author of the article “Is Business Ethics an Oxymoron?”, wrote: “In more general terms, businesses must care about ethics because businesses are part of a human community.…
In 1939, the term “white-collar crime” began to be associated with frauds committed by business and government professionals. The phrase was mentioned during a speech given by Edwin Sutherland to the American Sociological Society. Sutherland defined “white-collar” as “a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social stats in the course of his occupation” (White Collar Crime). However, white-collar crimes are described in various ways. The Justice Department characterize white-collar crimes as deceit, embezzlement, forgery, or a breach of trust that does not result in threatening into anything physical or violence (United States Justice Department).…
When employees in organizations make decisions to act unethically, they affect not only the company itself, but also its shareholders, employees and customers. Employees make a countless number of choices every day in businesses, if they act unethical, they can damage a company's productivity, profits and…
Example of being unethical in a business environment, (whistle blowing, bribe and corruption) Ethics is taking pride in your work, by being professional and working hard. Ethical behaviour provides specific conducts and rights, such as the code of conduct, and code of ethics. There are many examples of ethical and unethical behaviour in “The Founder”. Ray Kroc as the main actor in this film shows a series of unethical behaviour in his attitude, the things he says and the way he approaches business situations, but there are also a few ethical acts in this film.…