Accounting Irregularities and Financial Fraud: A Corporate Governance Guide

It only takes a phone call. One moment you're a titan of corporate management. You are, among other things, an outside director of a company that has, yet again, reported stellar results. The stock price is up. Senior management is happy with their well-deserved bonuses. And you're basking in the glow of a favorable article that has just appeared in Business Week.

Then, with a single phone call, everything changes. You're told that accounting irregularities have surfaced at the company. Inexplicably, the CFO has confessed. An emergency board of directors meeting is being called for the next day. There will be one item on the agenda: How to deal with a crisis.

Increasingly, boards of directors, audit committee members, and senior executives are finding themselves in precisely this situation. For virtually all of them, it will be the first time that they will go through it. For that matter, it will probably be the first time for their outside law firm, the certified public accountants who serve as their outside auditors, and almost everybody else involved. Some will choose the proper course of action almost as a matter of instinct. But, experience teaches, many will not.

This book is intended to provide a step-by step guide to the crises enveloping a company in the wake of fraudulent finanical reporting - and how to prevent it from happening in the first place. It is directed to almost everybody involved: outside directors, audit committee members, senior executives, CFOs, CPAs, in-house lawyers, and outside law firms. Experience teaches that, where fraudulent finanical reporting surfaces, the root causes and effects are almost always the same. Also the same are the strategies for dealing with them. -Michael Young