Professor Elam

There is no shortage of ethical failures as I put the ethics syllabus together.

One Herman Rosenblat concocted Angel at the Fence, supposedly a story of how he met his wife at a concentration camp. Oprah hailed it as a great love story, only problem it is not true.  Herman says he just wanted to write a great story, well Herman file it under fiction.

James Frey managed to do the same thing with A Million Little Pieces. DIfferent story but his suposed story of drug addiciton and redemption was not true either. Another Oprah Book of the Month Hoax. BUt Opray is not alone in being short of fact checkers.

Lena Guerrero claimed to have been the daughter of migrant workers, a Phi Beta Kappa UT grad which led then Gov Anne Richards to appoint her to the Tx RR Commission. But alas she was none of those things. SHe resigned after it came to public notice.  HOw did such an incident pass the governor's fact checking group?

Alex Haley became quite the cause celeb with his supposed historic novel, Roots. Made into a television mini series it was watched by millions of people. But it turns out that Alex simply turned the facts to fiction to fit a great story and copied the plot of another novel.

This is why professional auditors are cautioned to use professional skepticism. This does not mean about meaningless detail but about the big picture which is how the Bernie Madoff's manage to fool everyone. THey get the details right, and then seemingly no one asks the question, but does the king have new clothes?