Worldcom Case Took the Entire Term Paper

Madoff Investment Securities LLC (BLMIS) committed one of the greatest financial frauds in U.S. history. Investigations revealed that Mr. Madoff operated an elaborate "Ponzi Scheme" that started operating in 1980s.Even though Madoff was initially supposed to invest all of his clients' money in the securities markets, he never did so. Instead, he deposited the whole amount in a certain bank account that he held with the Chase Manhattan Bank. He therefore fulfilled his client's redemption requests using his own money. The fraud value was estimated at $50 billion and became a matter of public knowledge only after Madoff confessed to the crime. It can be regarded as the biggest financial fraud in U.S.'s history and it affected a large number of investors.The financial industry blamed the investors as well as regulators for neglecting the various warning signals that enabled Maddoff to continue with the fraud for several decades.

The Board structure

The company BLMIS had no elaborate board structure.

The role of customers/markets in corporate governance

The customers as well as markets are noted to be important in ensuring that there is good corporate governance in a given company. Customers and the markets must ensure that they are involved in the scrutiny of the books of accounting of a given company as well as reporting of any suspicious activities. This is because they are important stakeholders in the running of the company.The markets can help in corporate governance by the regulation of the organization's access to its funds as well as scrutinizing its financial performance (Haque, Arun and Kirkpatrick,2008)

The main lessons that can be learnt from the Maddoff's case

Maddoff's scandal presented some investment lessons to stakeholders, investors as well as financial regulators.

For investors

According to Barrett (2010), investors can learn lot of lessons from the Madoff's fraud case. These include:

1. Not relying on reputation

2. We should never ne greedy for quick profits

3. Investors must be very wary of steady and high returns

4. Investors should always demand disclosures. This means trusting the performance but verifying them.

For Regulators

The regulators must always monitor the markets for abnormal gains/returns. The regulators must investigate all tip offs/whistle blowers' claims. In the Maddoff's case SEC ignored the whistle blowing phone calls from Harry Markopolos (Levine,2011)

References

Akhigbe, A., Martin, A., and Whyte, A., (2005). Contagion effects of the world's largest bankruptcy: the case of WorldCom. The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance

45 (2005) 48 -- 64

Haque, F., Arun, T., and Kirkpatrick, C (2008) "Corporate Governance and Capital Markets: A

Conceptual Framework," 'Journal of Corporate Ownership and Control', 5(2)

Kirkpatrick & Lockhart (2002). First interim report of dick thornburgh, bankruptcy court

Examiner: WORLDCOM, INC., et al.

http://fl1.findlaw.com/news.findlaw.com/wp/docs/worldcom/thornburgh1strpt.pdf

Kuhn, J. Randel, Jr., and Steve G. Sutton (2006). Learning from Worldcom: Implications for Fraud Detection through Continuous Assurance. Journal of Emerging Technologies in Accounting, Vol. 3, pp. 61-80.

Levine, S (2011). SEC Has Learned Some Important Lessons From Its Madoff Failures, Like

"Return Harry Markopolos's Phone Calls."

http://dealbreaker.com/2011/07/sec-has-learned-some-important-lessons-from-its-madoff-failures-like-return-harry-markopoloss-phone-calls/

Richard, T (2003). MCI/Worldcom gets 'ethics' chief http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/10/14/mci_worldcom_gets_ethics_chief/

Singer, AW (2004).MCI's New Ethics Officer has a 'Set at the table'