Finance and Accounting for Business

Assessment - Essay - Accounting scandal

Module outcome 1: Critically analyse and interpret financial figures including cash flows.
Module outcome 2: Critically appraise the conceptual frameworks of financial reporting for companies for evaluating international corporate performance.

Required:

Recent accounting scandals at prominent companies such as Enron, HealthSouth, Tyco, and WorldCom appear to have shaken the confidence of investors. In the wake of these scandals, many of these companies saw their equity values plummet dramatically and experienced a decline in the credit ratings of their debt issues, often to junk status. Many of these firms were forced to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection from creditors. Revelations about the unreliability of reported earnings continue to mount, as evidenced by an alarming increase in the frequency of earnings restatements by firms in the last few years. The widespread failure in financial reporting has largely been blamed on weak internal controls. Worries about accounting problems are widely cited as a reason for the stock market slump that followed these scandals. (Agrawal and Chadha, 2005).

a) Identify an accounting scandal that happened in the past 2 decades and describe the background of the scandal.
b) Explain the accounting/financial reporting violations associated with this scandal in detail.
c) Based on your reading and analysis, what are the lessons to be learned from this scandal? How this scandal could have been avoided?

Agrawal, A., & Chadha, S. (2005). Corporate governance and accounting scandals. The Journal of Law and Economics, 48(2), 371-406.