ANTHONY H. CATANACH JR. is an associate professor in the School of Business at Villanova University, as well as the Cary M. Maguire Fellow at the American College Center for Ethics in Financial Services. His professional experience includes five years as an audit manager with KPMG and six years in the financial services industry. Dr. Catanach has received numerous awards for his publication, teaching, and curriculum innovation efforts. He has authored numerous articles on a variety of accounting, finance, and management issues, as well as several business education texts..
The case against three former executives at Nortel is coming to an end. Their actions have been characterized as a “fraud on the public” by the Canadian prosecutors during their closing statements. These managers at Nortel Networks Corporation allegedly used accounting tricks to buoy quarterly profits and activate various bonuses for themselves. Linda Nguen quotes [...]
Oct 082012
The 2008 financial crisis was brought about by bank managers who finagled various transactions, primarily in the mortgage markets or the market for their securitizations, and obfuscated with accounting cover-ups and opaque disclosures. Our governments have prosecuted very few of the criminals and have meted out fines at a fraction of the amounts that managers [...]
Jul 022012
California is getting a lot of press these days about its awful budget situation, most of which has been self-inflicted. Boskin and Cogan refer to California’s problems as “Casino Budgeting.” They observe the reluctance of Governor Jerry Brown and other state politicians to impose real reforms, relying instead on increasing tax rates, accounting gimmicks, and [...]
Some insiders of business corporations know when others are carrying out untoward actions or are neglecting their affirmative duties with respect to the securities laws. To crack down on fraudulent accounting, society needs to elicit information from these insiders to learn what actually took place. We need to find ways to convert these insiders into [...]
The business enterprise j2 Global Communications (JCOM) in its first quarter 2011 filing made an accounting change and called it a change in estimate. As several observers have noted, what the Company called a change in estimate is really an accounting error. What we would like to know is when will the SEC take JCOM’s [...]
J. EDWARD KETZ is an associate professor of accounting in the Smeal College of Business at Pennsylvania State University. He has a bachelor’s degree in political science, a master’s degree in accountancy, and a Ph.D., all from Virginia Tech. Professor Ketz has been a member of the Penn State faculty since 1981. He also has taught at the University of Connecticut and the University of Maryland. Professor Ketz has authored and edited 17 books including Hidden Financial Risk (Wiley, 2003) which examines the corporate culture and the institutional setting that engendered recent accounting scandals. Dr. Ketz has been cited in the popular and business press, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Business Week, and USA Today. He also has appeared as an accounting commentator on CNN, National Public Radio, and Bloomberg Radio.