THE REAL CULTURE OF CORRUPTION

In addition to the GOP's K Street Project, I'm beginning to think that Corporate America has lost it's moral bearings. The amount alone of short-term, greedy thinking that leads to such disasters as the Big ShitPile, the Housing Bubble, the Dot Com Bubble, the junk bond and the Savings & Loan scandals, seems to indicate that this problem has been around for a while (who could forget the scams of the Roaring Twenties or the Robber Barons of the 19th Century?). Apparently, some people at the SEC can forget!

Backdating probe had surprises for investigators
SEC team behind stock-options cases think abuses have been corrected
By Benjamin Pimentel, MarketWatch
Last update: 12:25 p.m. EST Jan. 19, 2008

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) - For Marc Fagel's team of government investigators, what began as an accounting and stock market puzzle turned into a major fraud probe that they believe has lifted the veil on the tech industry's shadier side.

A critical part of the scam, said Cary Robnett, the SEC's assistant regional director in San Francisco, was doctoring minutes of meetings to change the date of stock options grants. "For me, the practice of a lot of people involved in creating bogus minutes, high level people, shocks me," she said.

The SEC and other agencies have, so far, filed complaints against 10 chief financial officers, nine CEOS and eight attorneys, according to Robnett. The involvement of attorneys caused the most surprise for the team.

"One striking thing is how many lawyers have been sued and how critical a role that lawyers were playing in this fraud," said Michael Dicke, assistant regional director for enforcement at the SEC's office in San Francisco.

These lawyers, who were often the top-ranking legal experts at their respective companies, "had the necessary knowledge that what they were doing was wrong, and they were doing these things. That's surprising and disturbing," Dicke said.