accounting fraud

For many companies, meeting or beating quarterly earnings estimates matters more than anything else. All too often, the drive to perform bleeds into a temptation to cook the books. But astute investors can see behind the numbers to glimpse the truth. Here are a few of the major red flags.

Enron may be the most infamous, but it's just one of many instances of financial chicanery in recent corporate history. Examples of such shenanigans are rich, ripe, and recurring, right up to the present.

David Sokol, once considered a likely successor to Warren Buffett as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, resigned this week from Berkshire under a cloud of possible insider trading charges. But these recent ethical lapses are hardly the worst of Sokol's business transgressions.

Should Ernst & Young be held responsible for the bad actions of Lehman Brothers? New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, who Tuesday slapped the Big Four audit firm with civil fraud charges, thinks so. But it's not an easy question to answer.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has filed a civil lawsuit against Ernst & Young, alleging that the accounting giant helped now-defunct investment bank Lehman Brothers hide billions of dollars in debt from its investors via loans disguised as sales.

Over the last 11 years, Asia's IPO market has ascended while the U.S. market has imploded. Led by China, which has raised $76 billion through IPOs in 2010, Asia's share of global IPOs has increased from 12% in 1999 to 66%. Meanwhile, U.S. IPOs have declined from around 44% to 11% during the same time period, according to Bloomberg.

New York's highest court just gave a big gift to accountants, lawyers, and any other outside professional in a position to detect fraud at one of their corporate clients: The court ruled that shareholders still can't sue them for failing to detect the fraud.

A Belgian court has convicted Jo Lernout and Pol Hauspie, the founders of the once high-flying speech recognition software company Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products, of fraud for using a variety of means to artificially inflate the company's revenues and income.

Computer giant Dell Inc. has been slapped with a $100 million penalty to settle charges of accounting fraud and lying to investors, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced. Under the SEC settlement, Chairman and CEO Michael Dell, one of the world's richest men with a net worth of...

After a five-year investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, computer maker Dell agreed to pay a $100 million settlement to end civil charges of fraudulent accounting. The agency accuses Dell of pumping up its reported profits with undisclosed payments from Intel.