Anti-Money Laundering and the Strive to Prevent Corporate Corruption in the U.S. September 22nd, 2009
Anti-money laundering and anti-corruption organizations have been working on the cases of corruption that are rampant in many of developing nations of the world. Privatization of the public sector in these nations has served to curb the instances of corruption to a certain degree. One aspect of this global fight that may be getting overlooked, is the fact that in the United States, corporate corruption does happen frequently, and quite often it is on a grand scale.
And while the corruption in developing countries does affect not only the economic elements of those countries, but the social elements as well, the money that has changed hands in those countries really pales in comparison to the amount that has been filtered through the American corporations such as WorldCom and Enron. These are scams that total in the billions of dollars, much greater than the amounts of the foreign countries. Should the dissemination of the correct information, these problems would have been avoided.
With the correct information at hand, and the concept of transparency in place, the shareholders and investors would have noticed right away that something was amiss. The right information would have led to those who where committing the criminal acts of embezzlement and fraud, to a swift investigation and a removal from the offices in which they held. However, the mis-leading information provided in the accounting books, and the tax breaks in which these executives took in order to hide their gains.
Furthermore, in receiving assistance from the United States Treasury, these corporations were rewarding their crooked executives with bonuses involving stock options in the companies. All of these people were paid handsomely for basically committing some of the largest corporate fraud cases in financial history. This was a case of trying to make this all better in the short term, for has history proves, the long term affects were devastating, not only on the people whom were taken advantage of, the employees of those corporations, but on the reputation of American business ethics overall.
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