Infectious Greed: Restoring Confidence in Americas Companies

The behavior of many corporate executives has been atrocious. While criminal activity is disappointing, we believe those committing crimes will be punished. We are disappointed that the monitoring mechanisms put in place failed to deter and even detect the misdeeds. What were the boards of directors doing? How did the auditors and analysts miss the problems? How were the bankers involved? We explore these questions in the chapters of the next section, Part 2, "The Failure of Monitoring Systems."

Other behavior can only be classified as suspicious. We suspect that those who have acted suspiciously will not be held accountable. There may never be enough evidence to prove criminal actions. There is also simply too much ambiguity in the policies dealing with insiders. In addition to strengthening monitoring mechanisms, there clearly needs to be some better policies and rules that apply to corporate insiders to prevent activities that appear to be suspicious. We offer ideas in Chapter 13.