Why people commit fraud. An Inside Look At An Autonomy Sales Deal. Ethics Hero: Golfer Blayne Barber. Airport Ethics: And This Is How Cheating Becomes Respectable. CFO Accused of Murder-for-Hire on His Employer's Dime. By Teresa Ambord Wealthy Texas CFO John Franklin Howard (who goes by Frank Howard) is accused of embezzling millions from his employer.
This complaint comes on the heels of his arrest in late August for allegedly hiring a teenage hit man to kill his wife Nancy. On August 18, Nancy Howard was attacked in the garage of the Carrollton, Texas, home she shared with her husband. In the attack she was shot over the left eye. She survived the shot but lost her eye. Bad to Worse Eight days after the shooting, nineteen-year-old Dustin Hiroms told police that Howard had hired him to kill Nancy and make it look like an accident. 11 Signs That A Company Is Lying In Its Earnings Announcement. 27 Psychological Reasons Why Good People Do Bad Things. 10 People Who Were Publicly Shamed For Lying On Their Resumes. Untitled. Closing the Gate. Rita Crundwell, comptroller of an Illinois city of 15,000 residents, has allegedly stolen $53 million from the city since 1990.
Federal prosecutors say she used the money to fund one of the top horse ranches in the country and she did it with style, spending over $300,000 for jewelry and $2.1 million for a motor coach. She had over 150 horses. Her annual salary? $80,000. Were annual audits performed? Was the audit report submitted to state officials for review? Were budgets approved? So how could this happen? As is often the case with fraud, Ms. It was a Pepto Bismol moment when the mayor was presented with evidence of the fraud. The mayor said the city’s annual audit, as well as an audit review by the state comptroller’s office, raised no red flags, and the city’s main bank never reported anything suspicious.
Small cities often lack appropriate segregation of duties. Woman Who Couldn’t Be Intimidated by Citigroup Wins $31 Million. Sherry Hunt never expected to be a senior manager at a Wall Street bank.
She was a country girl, raised in rural Michigan by a dad who taught her to fish and a mom who showed her how to find wild mushrooms. She listened to Marty Robbins and Buck Owens on the radio and came to believe that God has a bigger plan, that everything happens for a reason. She got married at 16 and didn’t go to college.
After she had her first child at 17, she needed a job. High-Flying Auto Dealer Employee Steals $10M For Luxuries. Patricia Smith, the former controller of an auto dealership in Pennsylvania, is headed to jail after embezzling $10 million from her former boss in a stunning case of a trusted employee looting the business then squandering the cash on luxuries.
Smith, who worked at Baierl Acura located in Wexford, Pa., an upper-middle class suburb of Pittsburgh, was convicted of systematically stealing for seven years--some $4,000 a day on average--for private jet travel, special trips to the theatre, fancy clothes and other goods, according to the court. A costume fitting on Broadway? Check. Super Bowl Tickets? Check. [Related: Man gambles away $1.5M accidentally given by ATM] Ethics Message of the Week: Henry Rollins. 10 People Who Were Publicly Shamed For Lying On Their Resumes. “Show Boat” Ethics: Defining Deceit. I frequently discuss the concept of deceit in ethics seminars, and my favorite example, which I have also used on Ethics Alarms, is the famous “Does your dog bite?”
Gag from “The Pink Panther Strikes Again!” This morning I was reminded of an even better example, though not so funny, while watching Turner Movie Classics. TMC was showing the 1936 Hollywood adaptation of “Showboat,” the black-and-white version directed by James Whale of “Frankenstein” fame, that is richer and more faithful to the original Oscar Hammerstein-Jerome Kern Broadway musical than the later, color version starring Ava Gardner, Kathryn Grayson and Howard Keel.
A key sub-plot in “Showboat” involves Julie LaVerne, the show boat’s leading actress, who has been passing as white in the post-Civil War South despite having a black mother. She is married to the show boat’s leading man, Steve Baker, who is white, and thus in violation of the strict miscegenation laws then in force in the South.
Utah Business. The Unethical Rationalization List: 24 and Counting. Ethics Alarms frequently refers to rationalizations, which lie at the core of most unethical conduct.
They are, as one ethicist put it, lies we tell ourselves to allow us to pretend that what we know is wrong, isn’t. Some rationalizations are used so frequently, by us and others, that we come to believe them. The list of rationalizations has been available on the blog under the Rule Book heading from the beginning, but it is constantly updated, and even though posts frequently link to it, it is clear to me, especially from comments that resort to exactly the same examples of flawed ethical reasoning that populate the list, that a lot of visitors never see it. Ethics Hero: NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. Today the National Football League announced the following response to the results of its investigation of bounties being offered and paid by the New Orleans Saints to its players for injuring key opposition players in games.
From the NFL press release: “Commissioner Roger Goodell notified the New Orleans Saints today of the discipline that will be imposed on team management for violations of the NFL’s long-standing “bounty” rule that endangered player safety over a three-year period. “Discipline for individual players involved in the Saints’ prohibited program continues to be under review with the NFL Players Association and will be addressed by Commissioner Goodell at a later date. Affinity-fraud.pdf (application/pdf Object) Psychos on Wall Street. Dr. Z’s Tips to Avoid Unethical Influences in the Workplace and in Life.
Australia bus boss gives staff $16m sale share. 1 February 2012Last updated at 03:21.
Affinity fraud: Fleecing the flock. The Cost of Doing Business: Foxconn, Apple and the Fate of the Modern Worker. "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.
" - Immanuel Kant Ours is an imperfect society. The nature of our reality, our desires and our need to possess, while maintaining a façade of moral righteousness, puts us at odds with the reality that exists within the systems we have created. In recent days, the character of our era of consumerism has been put in question. We want what is new, shiny, fashionable. Thought Leadership: Whistleblower Case Study-Independent Internal Investigations. When a whistleblower goes to a government agency with allegations of fraud and corruption, no one knows whether the government will act.
The more detailed and credible the allegations, the more likely the government will ask questions. How 'jailhouse CPA' Ronald Williams landed a $327,456 tax refund from prison. ThinkstockThe IRS sent a $327,456 tax refund check to inmate Ronald Williams at Camp Gabriels Correctional Facility in Northern New York. Williams helped at least one other inmate file a fake tax form. As he sat in a state prison in 2006, Ronald Williams claimed he made $500,000. The IRS didn’t question it.
The IRS sent Williams a refund check for $327,456 to his address: Camp Gabriels Correctional Facility in northern New York. But when prison staff opened his mail April 10, 2007, imagine the surprise: Prisoners don’t get six-figure tax refund checks. Corrections staff sent the check back to the IRS, gave Williams a copy and put him on notice: no more fake tax forms. But baited by the hundreds of thousands of dollars he almost received, Williams tried 11 more times, using income amounts that went up and up — the highest was $293 million, according to Assistant U.S.
What Do You Do When The Ethics Alarm Sounds Late? This… A photography site that knows about ethics, too. SmugMug is a photo sharing website that comes complete with a blog on photo sharing issues, including ethical ones. Here is the blog’s most recent post, a remarkable confession and an apology, as excellent an example of taking responsibility for a mistake, being accountable and apologizing sincerely to the party harmed as there is.
The post is entitled, “What Were We Thinking?” 10 People Who Were Publicly Shamed For Lying On Their Resumes.