I learned some new things from the case article that were not mentioned in Cynthia Cooper’s book titled Extraordinary Circumstances. However, the gist of it was the same. I will focus my paragraphs based on the three questions.
What are the pressures that lead executives and managers to “cook the books?” There are several factors that can come into play. For WorldCom, it started with the deterioration of the industry in 2000. This was due to overcapacity, heightened competition, the economic recession, the dot-com bubble collapse, and a reduced demand for telecommunications services. All of these factors put extra pressure on WorldCom’s most important performance indicator, the expense-to-revenue ratio. The company was so concerned about keeping it above 42% that they were willing to do anything, even commit fraud. Bernie Ebbers told the senior staff that they would lose everything if the company did not improve its performance.
This leads into my second pressure, which deals with personal lives. Employees were receiving tremendous benefits due to the company’s great performance. However, if the company did not improve, people’s salaries would be cut or even worse, their jobs would be cut. That is why so many people were willing to engage in the fraud, because they felt WorldCom was supplying a salary and benefits that other companies would not be able to match. Betty Vinson was a prime example. She knew that releasing line accruals was wrong, but needed to
Green Meadows Hospital is newly constructed community hospital owned by Southern Hospitals Corporation. Kate Cooper was very excited when she got a new position at Green Meadows as a Manager of Adult Services. They started hiring people and were getting ready to open the hospital. However, things did not go well as they planned and wanted to. Therefore, Kate had to resign. The biggest problem that I see in this was their unorganized management skills and communications skills. They should have more prepared since they were new hospital and related to people’s lives but from the beginning, it seemed like they did not think that it was a big of deal and just went it the flow.
Because the telecom industry was doing well in the 90's, Ebbers became very rich as the value of WorldCom's stock climbed. However in the early 2000s the industry took a swing for the worst, earnings rejected, and WorldCom's stock began to fall. Ebbers quickly became "upside down" on his stock holdings and owed millions to the banks he borrowed money from. In a desperate attempt to prevent himself from going bankrupt, Ebbers and other company executives began fraudulently altering WorldCom's financial statements. Many people were hurt by the WorldCom fraud. Lots of honest, hard working line level WorldCom employees lost their jobs while losing the value of the stock in their WorldCom retirement savings accounts at the same time. Other investors who depended on WorldCom's false financial statements also lost what they invested. Nobody really benefited from the scandal, however it did give the executives a couple more years of glory and power before everything went
Cynthia Cooper was contemplating over this whole debacle with what was the right decision to make with her discovering “almost four billion dollars in questionable accounting entries”. (Mead) While contemplating something crossed her mind on deciding if she should speak up and become known as a whistleblower, is that her findings could cost WorldCom’s credibility, about seventy thousand employees would lose their jobs, and also pension funds that were loaded with WorldCom stock. Her job as an internal auditor she had a responsibility to WorldCom’s Stockholders and also her own conscious to do something like as the fraud that was uncovered was so
This reading is about a case happened in 1988 and arguments of the case based on different points of view.
The stakeholders in this fraudulent case of WorldCom consist of Bernie Ebbers, Scott Sullivan, Buford Yates, David Myers, Cynthia Cooper, and Betty Vinson belong to the company. While the other stakeholders would consist of the creditors, Andersen (accounting firm), investors, and the public. This fraudulent act committed within WorldCom impacted every single stakeholder in a way. Either in a negative or positive way, most of the impact was caused with harm to everyone. The main individuals such as Ebbers, Sullivan, and Vinson all had major consequences as resulting with the fraud. Criminal trials were a major result with their fraudulent acts within WorldCom. Cooper was a lifesaver by most of the community. Aside from these individuals, the rest also got affected by the fraud. Investments conducted by the investors were all lost within the fraud process. The impact towards much of the image for Andersen was ruined. Many of the public lost their trust on the honesty and professionalism of Andersen and other certified public accounting firms. The entire employees from the top management to the smaller group of workers stayed unemployed and some with criminal punishment.
Once you have read the case, answer the questions that follow the case text. I have reprinted the questions below to assist you in your answers.
In the scenario, in which we explore Susan’s personal philosophy with managements actions to move the Oncology units nursing to staff to the medical-surgical unit to provide adequate staffing. Unfortunately, the decision by management had already been proposed. Susan is forced into a situation of reactive planning. According to Marquis and Huston (2015), This entails problem solving after a situation that is unsatisfactory already exists. Susan’s plan will be directed at restoring some assemblance of comfort within her nursing unit. The best type of planning for use in this situation would be both interactive and proactive. According to Marquis and Huston (2015), This type of planning considers the past, present and future and occurs to meet
In this listen passage, Susan talked about her experience when she was young. She met a car accident when she was 17 years old. She got the injury on her brain and lost the reading ability. During her recovering period in the reading skill training class, Susan met a 27-year-old guy who seemed like have some disabilities. When Susan introduced herself, the guy just wrote what Susan said. Such situation happened repeatedly. One day, Susan decided to figure out a way to solve this quandary. Susan started to ignore him and pretend teaching an invisible student to learn the word. Suddenly, the old guy realized that everything has a name. Finally, Susan used her way to help the old guy read the word and recover successfully.
A dramatic situation that has occurred in the selection is when Marjorie first encounters Constance Stevens. In this selection Marjorie is portrayed an optimistic girl who wanted to be friends with everyone, and the rules did not change for her when she meets Constance. However, Constance’s opinion is different from Marjorie. In Constance’s eyes she sees Marjorie is the new girl who did not understand the cruelty of her classmates that tortures her. Constance felt that she cannot be friends with Marjorie out of fear that her classmates will bully Marjorie for being friends with the poor girl.
On March 15, 2005 former CEO of WorldCom, Bernard Ebbers sat in a federal courtroom waiting for the verdict. As the former CEO of WorldCom, Ebbers was accused of being personally responsible for the financial destruction of the communications giant. An internal investigation had uncovered $11 billion dollars in fraudulent accounting practices. Later a second report in 2003 found that during Ebber’s 2001 tenure as CEO, the company had over-reported earnings and understated expenses by an astonishing $74.5 billion dollars (Martin, 2005, para 3). This report included the mismanagement of funds, unethical lending practices among its top executives, and false bookkeeping which led to loss of tens of thousands of its employees.
From the time of WorldCom’s inception there always seemed to be a tradition in management as if the company was only 100 or so employees. There was a “good old boys” mentality among the limited few running the company and if you were outside that circle then were told only what they wanted you to hear. An unspoken rule among employees was to do what you were told without questions or risk the consequences. One example of this situation occurred when senior management member Gene Morse told an employee “If you show those damn numbers to the f****ing auditors, I’ll throw you out the window” (Kaplan, R.S., & Kiron, D., 2007, p. 3).WorldCom showed no concern regarding an employee’s need and obligation to voice concerns on matters related
The actions of former WorldCom Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Bernard Ebbers were extremely indicative of leadership. Unfortunately, Ebbers also displayed destructive deviant behavior that was equally as extreme. He was described by key staff members at WorldCom as a “charismatic leader who inspired extraordinary levels of personal loyalty and high employee performance” (Treviño & Brown, 2005). As a leader, Ebbers gave back to the Mississippi community by teaching at his local church, serving meals to the less fortunate, and donating over $1 million to help disadvantaged Afro-Americans.
However, the WorldCom’s stock price still declined. This incapacity in declining profits led to the withdrawal of merging with Sprint forced by the U.S. Justice department. In addition, banks put increasing burdens on Bernard Ebbers to pay back the loans that he used to invest in his other businesses. Ebbers soon felt the need to display an stable and increasing revenue and profits. His idea to meet this goal was financial gimmickry. The problem was that this was a last resort and involved deception. The more perplexed it became, the riskier to continue in this way. In general, cheat was just not an applicable way in the long run. In 2001, Bernard Ebbers convinced his board of directors to provide a loan of $400 million to cover up his debt who hoped that this strategy could stop the decline in WorldCom’s stock price. However, this strategy failed and led to further decrease in the price of WorldCom’s stock price. All of those changes in company loss ended up $1.38 billion in 2001. In 2002, a team of employees at WorldCom worked together to investigate and reveal the $3.8 billion worth of fraud. Soon or later, the board of directors were notified of this fraud and made many resignations. After some irregularities were spotted in MCI’s magazines, the Security and Exchange Commission requested WorldCom to provide more information and started to investigate into the fraud. SEC was skeptical of WorldCom’s enormous earning on the
A multitude of choices made by executives at WorldCom led to the ultimate demise of the company as it was previously known, the employees and their livelihoods’, and the trust of the American people. In a time when corporations fail to set ethical standards and provide transparency to investors, how do we change corporate culture on a national level? By analyzing choices made to improve stock prices and company image that ultimately result in failure-- we can guide
This paper will discuss the corporation WorldCom, a telecommunications company that was based in Mississippi. In 2002 WorldCom was involved in one of the largest accounting scandals in the United States. WorldCom inflated its assets by nearly $11 billion dollars, which eventually lead to about 30,000 employees losing their jobs, as well as, 180-billion dollars in losses for its investors. The CEO at the time of this accounting fraud was Bernard Ebbers and led to him receiving a 25-year prison sentence. This paper will go into the details of how WorldCom was able to manipulate its accounting records to deceive its internal auditors, as well as, investors.