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THE EFFECTS OF ETHICS ACTIVITIES ON FRAUD : AN EMPIRICAL STUDY OF ACTUAL INSTANCES OF FRAUD

INTRODUCTION With the extraordinary financial frauds of recent years, much attention has been given to the idea of ethics. The ethical conduct of executives at Enron, WorldCom, and Adelphia, to mention a few, has been questioned by the public, U. S. Congress, and the judicial system. In addition, the SEC reached a settlement of $1.4 billion with the nation’s top investment firms to resolve issues of conflict of interest at brokerage firms – an ethics related issue. The moral character of all business is being called into question for events such as insider trading, scandals, improper mergers and acquisitions, obscene compensation, excessive profits, earnings management, income smoothing, greenmail, overcharging on government contracts, and destruction and falsification of corporate documents. Either ethical standards have reached new lows, or ethical behavior has been redefined (Bitner and Crawford 2002). Most ethical problems can be traced to greed, facilitated by opportunity and pressure. Perhaps no other events are representative of the current deleterious scope and impact of ethics and fraud problems as the recent financial disasters: Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia, etc. In the case of Enron, board members lost their independence and oversight, to some degree, and were accused of failure in oversight duties. For example, board members earned more than $300,000 – nearly three times the national average for big firms! USA Today (2002) put it this way: “With that much money at stake, anyone would be reluctant to raise much of a stink.” In addition, several board members benefited from consulting fees, as high as $490,000, and other