August 25 2015 Tuesday In contrast to our Who's the Worst List, we out of fairness, start a Who's the Best List.  8/25/15 Our first group is clearly the six who stopped the gunman on the Paris bound train.  In the same spirit as the group who kept the third plane from hitting the White House,…

Tuesday Aug 18, 2015 Thieves stole tax information on 334,000 taxpayers.  Access was gained via a program called 'Get Transcript'. The thieves managed to get by the SS number and other information to get back tax information. The reason for the theft would be to file false returns claiming refunds.  Once again, there is no…

Note to readers, I moved this post to the forefront for the benefit of the Fall 2015  Accounting Students. We study fraud in several classes. Amazing how much of it there is new and fresh every fall! I also have links to the posts from previous years.    This thread begun Thursday August 13, 2015…

Thursday August 13, 2015 A new bill would give the SEC up to ten years to pursue civil fraud cases.   Hmm, it's like the statutue of limitations never runs out!.

Wed July 29, 2015 South Florida leads the nation in fraud.

Monday July 20 2015 This is a good article on accounting scams.

Tuesday June  2 2015 Merrill Lynch was fined for violating a rule regarding short sales.  The 'fine' was $9 M and they gave up $1.6 M n profits, I wonder how those numbers were determined? But here is our TBTF Too Big to Fail example of a firm once again.  Amazingly after being one hour…

Thursday May 21, 2015 I always say that every spring when it is time to teach ethics, I never run out  of new examples.  Here is how you make the Barron's Top  100 financial Advisor List. Have an affair with a wealthy client, run 12,000 unauthorized trades in five years through his account generating $40  M…

Wed April 28,  2015 I recently suggested that the formation of the Corinthian 100 was a prelude to the college loan bubble beginning to burst. The Corinthian 100 are refusing to re pay loans extended to attend Corinthian campuses. The reason is that the Dept of Education forced Corinthian out of business. Now thousands of students…

Thursday April 23 2015 From "Citizenship in a Republic," a speech that former president Theodore Roosevelt delivered on April 23, 1910, at the Sorbonne in Paris: It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.…