The reality was that a company which aspired to be "the No. 1 stock on Wall Street" was instead steadily bleeding money while claim growth in the billions.
The pressure placed upon accountants at WordCom was reflective of the pressure facing accountants throughout the economy during this period of widely absence securities oversight. Indeed, the relationship between regulation and accounting is essential, and this diminished link would have catastrophic implications for the profession as a whole. Such is shown by the Scott text, which tells that "efficient securities market theory has major implications for financial accounting. One of these is that supplementary information in financial statement notes or elsewhere is just as useful as information in the financial statements proper. Another is that efficiency is defined relative to a stock of publicly known information. Financial reporting has a role to play in improving the amount, timing, and accuracy of this stock, thereby enabling capital markets to work better and improve the operation of the economy." (Scott, 115)
The reverse is also true. Weak and disinterested Securities oversight produces the type of financial reporting deception that fueled individual wealth at the expense of the economy. Today, the accounting profession has seen a significant amount of discredit, with the regulatory conditions of Sarbanes-Oxley demonstrating the public will to impose greater oversight on this profession. We are also inclined to note that greater encouragement and protection...
(Skeel, 110) Given that thousands of WorldCom employees saw their pension plans frittered away by the gross criminality of their core leadership, we can see that the motivation to serve as a whistleblower should inherently be the preservation of one's job security.
These recommendations are a demonstration of the necessity for honest and transparent financial reporting and internal communication. Ultimately though, we also conclude that the current American corporate culture remains far too unregulated. Therefore, a proper step would be the governmental placement of strict limitations and conditions on the bonuses which can be awarded to corporate CEOs based on company performance, with some level of proportion to internal salaries being used to determine this. Legislation is recommended to create parameters that restrain the corruptive impulses of these CEOs while simultaneously respecting the value of free market behaviors. In the absence of these, greedy CEOs such as Ebbers can distort the market and create a chain reaction of economic events that, in this case, have plunged us into a depression.
Works Cited:
Kaplan, R.S. & Kiron, D. (2007). Accounting Fraud at WorldCom. Harvard Business School.
Scott, W.R. (2006). Financial Accounting Theory, 4th Ed. Pearson-Prentice Hall.
Skeel, D. (2005). Icarus in the Boardroom: The Fundamental Flaws in Corporate America and Where They Came From. Oxford University Press.
