Professor Elam

Acct in Admissions Scandal Pleads Guilty

https://www.wsj.com/articles/business-manager-in-college-admissions-scheme-reaches-plea-agreement-11559343830?mod=hp_lista_pos2

College Admission Scandal

Monday April 15 2019

Here is the latest on the admission scandal.

One couple is pleading not guilty while 13 other parents have agreed to plead guilty.

I don't get it.  This may be unethical, but seems to me the problem is between the parents and the entrance exam folks or the colleges. What is the standing of the DOJ?  The prosecutors have apparently scared the 13 into a plea deal.

In the Uresti case I covered, a business man named Farthing faced a similar charge. The charge was that he had conspired iwth Uresti and the  County Judge in Pecos for a contract. Instead Farthing was able to show that he paid the understood fee, 10K a month to Uresti who split it with the Judge. Farthing showed that he even filed the proper IRS form  1099.

It seems to me the parents could claim the same thing. They hired a coach and admissions experts but had not knowledge of their fraudulent ways.   That sounds better than a sure fire one way trip to jail.

Hollywood Atresses Involved in College Admission Bribe Scheme

Tuesday March 12, 2019

hFelicity Huffman, wife of Bill Macy and late of Desperate Housewives, tried to bribe her daughter in to

Major colleges.

As Ron White says,

You can't fix stupid.

More on Loughlin and Huffman

KPMG Partner, PAOB Employee Found Guilty

Tuesday March 12, 2019

KPMG Head of Audit and a PCOAB former emplolyee were found guilty on several counts.

David Middendorf apparently convinced Jeffrey Wada at the PCAOB to reveal which KPMG audits the PCAOB planned to examine.

With two PCAOB employees and one KPMG employee already pleading guilty, why was Middendorf lawyer surprised at the verdict?

Something seems to be amiss at KPMG.  After the biggest fine in history for their tax shelter scheme ($450 M) one would think all would have gotten the memo on ethical behavior.

 

Apparently not.

Additional Links

https://www.accountingtoday.com/news/former-kpmg-and-pcaob-officials-convicted-for-inspection-scheme 

http://retheauditors.com/2019/03/10/the-question-of-the-kpmg-whistleblower/

 

 

Jeff Skilling Released from Prison

Monday March 3, 2019

Jeff Skilling former CFO of Enron, has been released from prison.

It was the combination of CEO Ken Lay, CFO Skillikng and Comptroller Andy Fastow that created

The Smartest Guys in the Room.

This and the Worldcom scandal combined to result in Sarbanes Oxley the most restrictive accounting legislation ever.

Jimmy Galindo Pleads Guilty

Tuesday Feb 26, 2019

Former Reeves County Judge plead guilty on various counts.

this is part of the Uresti case I am presenting on at the SA IIA Fraud conference Feb 27.

No tax returns since  2004, what was this guy thinking!

Title IX Gals in the Pit Crew What Next?

Monday Feb 18 2019

Gals in the Daytona Pit Crew

 

https://www.yahoo.com/gma/daytona-500s-first-female-tire-changers-history-150405067--abc-news-entertainment.html

Cop Leaves $100 tip on $8.75 bill

Monday Feb 18, 2019

Policeman surprises pregnant waitress with big tip.

An great ethical success.

Wonderful application of the Golden Rule.

op Leaves $100 tip on $8.75 bill

Monday Feb 18, 2019

Policeman surprises pregnant waitress with big tip.

An great ethical success.

The APA Takes on Emerson's Self Reliance

Friday Feb 8, 2019

I have assigned Ralph Emerson's famous essay on Self Reliance in my ACCT 5308 Ethics class.

A professor examines the American Psychological Association opinion that Self Reliance might be a Mental Illness.

This article appears on Page  A 13 to the Feb 9 WSJ.

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1841 essay “Self-Reliance” is a statement of American values. “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.” “God will not have his work made manifest by cowards.” “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.” “The sinew and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are become timorous, desponding whimperers. We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other.”

The American Psychological Association regards these values as obsolete and pathological. “Western culture defines specific characteristics to fit the patriarchal ideal masculine construct,” writes an APA committee. “The socialization of masculine ideals starts at a young age and defines ideal masculinity as related to toughness, stoicism, heterosexism, self-sufficient attitudes and lack of emotional sensitivity and of connectedness.” Among those “components of traditional masculinity” is “self-reliance.”

 

 

How times have changed. When Emerson was writing, Americans like Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller and Lucretia Mott were skeptical of authority and valued dissent and independence of thought. They understood that dependence makes you vulnerable, even though we all do depend on one another in various ways. If you rely on the government for food, clothing, and shelter, you are at its mercy—currently that of Donald Trump. And as Thoreau argued in “Civil Disobedience,” if you depend on the government, you are disabled from resisting it. Recognizing that relationship between freedom and self-reliance, many feminists—from Abigail Adams’s era through the 1970s—taught that women must become less dependent on men.

circa 1870: American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882) who was among the leaders of the transcendental movement in Boston. (Photo by Otto Herschan Collection/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) Photo: Otto Herschan Collection/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Emerson’s essay is about self-development and self-realization, values that the APA in another mood might praise. And it is about the importance, for each of us and for society, of independent thought. “The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature,” writes Emerson. “A boy is in the parlour what the pit is in the playhouse; independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests: he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him: he does not court you.”

Even more than in Emerson’s time, we tend to think in groups or as groups. Many of us vociferously express opinions we do not hold or came to hold through a process of self-deception. It turns us into tribes of warring, servile conformists. Perhaps without realizing it, the APA is articulating a set of moral norms. That is also what Emerson was up to in his essay, though he was aware of it. These systems of values are exquisitely incompatible, an additional sign that America, for better and worse, has become something like the opposite of what it was.

Mr. Sartwell teaches philosophy at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa.