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- September 2024
- Case
Comun: Partners in Peril
By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang and Alexis Lefort
In spring 2023, Abiel Gutierrez and Andres Santos, co-founders of Comun, faced a critical decision at their fintech startup serving Latino immigrants. Having launched their product the previous year, they experienced rapid growth but encountered rising fraud and... View Details
- February 2024
- Course Overview Note
The Anatomy of Fraud
By: Jonas Heese
Corporate fraud remains a serious problem. Learning how to detect and prevent it, and make better investment decisions, has broad applicability for private and public market investors, as well as for people joining or running companies. This course note describes a... View Details
- January 2024
- Case
Post-Wirecard: BaFin under Mark Branson
By: Jonas Heese, Carlota Moniz and Daniela Beyersdorfer
In November 2023, Mark Branson, the head of Germany's Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin), reflected on the efficacy of the reforms initiated since the Wirecard scandal. BaFin had been discredited after Wirecard’s downfall in 2020. The press had derided it... View Details
- June 2023
- Case
Dan McCrum - Unmasking Wirecard
By: Jonas Heese, Charles C.Y. Wang, Tonia Labruyere and Carlota Moniz
Dan McCrum, an investigative journalist for the Financial Times, had spent the past six years fighting to expose German payment processing firm Wirecard. The company had enjoyed years of exponential growth and was viewed by several investors as the poster child of... View Details
- December 7, 2022
- Article
Why Decentralized Crypto Platforms Are Weathering the Crash
By: Shai Bernstein and Scott Duke Kominers
In the past year, crypto markets dropped from $2.9 trillion in value to around $800 billion. In the wake of the collapse, crypto lenders and exchanges have been accused of fraud and other wrongdoing. What went wrong? One factor is competition. In theory, competition... View Details
- October 2022 (Revised May 2023)
- Case
Ginkgo Bioworks vs. Scorpion Capital: The Debate Over Related-Party Revenues
Ginkgo Bioworks, a synthetic biology company based in Boston, Massachusetts, faced divergent views on its revenue possibilities and accounting practices. After a report emerged accusing it of fraudulent accounting and lack of innovation, its share price plunged. But... View Details
- Article
When the Local Newspaper Leaves Town: The Effects of Local Newspaper Closures on Corporate Misconduct
By: Jonas Heese, Gerardo Pérez Cavazos and Caspar David Peter
We examine whether the local press is an effective monitor of corporate misconduct. Specifically, we study the effects of local newspaper closures on violations by local facilities of publicly listed firms. After a local newspaper closure, local facilities increase... View Details
- May 2022
- Article
When Harry Fired Sally: The Double Standard in Punishing Misconduct
By: Mark Egan, Gregor Matvos and Amit Seru
We examine gender differences in misconduct punishment in the financial advisory industry. We find evidence of a “gender punishment gap”: following an incident of misconduct, female advisers are 20% more likely to lose their jobs and 30% less likely to find new jobs... View Details
- 2022
- Chapter
Measuring Compliance Risk and the Emergence of Analytics
By: Eugene F. Soltes
Corporate compliance manages a diverse set of regulatory and reputational concerns ranging from fraud to privacy to discrimination. However, effectively managing such risks has often been hampered by a lack of adequate information about when, where, and why misconduct... View Details
- December 2021
- Case
Slice Labs: Creating a Fraud-free Online Insurance Platform
By: Amit Goldenberg, Max Bazerman and Ruth Page
"Slice Labs: Creating a Fraud-Free Online Insurance Platform" engages students with the challenge of how to influence other parties to not engage in fraud in the context of digital insurance. The case is centered around Slice, a digital insurance company that was... View Details
Keywords: Technology; Insurance; Digitization; Honesty; Negotiation; Fraud; Ethics; Negotiation Process; Negotiation Tactics; Negotiation Types; Social Psychology; Conflict and Resolution; Trust; Fairness; Moral Sensibility; Values and Beliefs; Crime and Corruption; Insurance Industry; Technology Industry; United States; Canada
- November 2021
- Article
Strict ID Laws Don't Stop Voters: Evidence from a U.S. Nationwide Panel, 2008–2018
By: Enrico Cantoni and Vincent Pons
U.S. states increasingly require identification to vote—an ostensive attempt to deter fraud that prompts complaints of selective disenfranchisement. Using a difference-in-differences design on a 1.6-billion-observations panel dataset, 2008–2018, we find that the laws... View Details
- Article
Is ‘Not Guilty’ the Same as ‘Innocent’? Evidence from SEC Financial Fraud Investigations
By: Eugene F. Soltes and David H. Solomon
When the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigates firms for financial fraud, investors learn about the investigation only if managers disclose it, or regulators sanction the firm. We investigate the effects of such disclosures using confidential records on... View Details
- March 2021 (Revised April 2021)
- Case
Wirecard: The Downfall of a German Fintech Star
By: Jonas Heese, Charles C.Y. Wang and Tonia Labruyere
Wirecard was a German fintech company, member of the DAX30, that provided payment processing and related services. Wirecard had enjoyed large growth rates over the years and most investors and analysts were enthusiastic about the company's prospects. Wirecard's... View Details
- February 2021
- Article
The Department of Justice as a Gatekeeper in Whistleblower-Initiated Corporate Fraud Enforcement: Drivers and Consequences
By: Jonas Heese, Ranjani Krishnan and Hari Ramasubramanian
We examine drivers and consequences of U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) oversight of whistleblower cases of corporate fraud against the government. We find that the DOJ is more likely to intervene in and conduct longer investigations of cases that have a higher chance... View Details
- January 2021 (Revised May 2021)
- Case
'GEnron'? Markopolos versus General Electric (A)
By: Jonas Heese and David Lane
In August 2019, Harry Markopolos—the forensic accountant known for uncovering Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme—alleged that General Electric had committed accounting fraud totaling $38 billion, coining the term “GEnron” for perceived similarities with the 2001 accounting... View Details
- Article
The Department of Justice as a Gatekeeper in Whistleblower-Initiated Corporate Fraud Enforcement: Drivers and Consequences
By: Jonas Heese, Ranjani Krishnan and Hari Ramasubramanian
- August 2020
- Supplement
Luckin Coffee (B): Revelations of Fraud
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Karen Elterman
This case describes revelations of fraud at Luckin Coffee, beginning with an anonymous report in January 2020 and continuing with the company’s admission in April 2020 that it had inflated its revenues by 2.2 billion RMB ($310 million), almost half its reported... View Details
- June 2020
- Case
Recovering Trust After Corporate Misconduct at Wells Fargo
By: Suraj Srinivasan and Jonah S. Goldberg
The case describes widespread misconduct at Wells Fargo Community Bank in the period leading up to 2017 and the company’s subsequent attempts to improve internal controls, company culture, and corporate governance. The case examines the potential causes of large scale... View Details
- 2019
- Article
The Frequency of Corporate Misconduct: Public Enforcement versus Private Reality
By: Eugene F. Soltes
Perceptions about the frequency of misconduct—among the public, academics and even
regulators—have largely been formed by examining enforcement statistics, which rely on the detection and sanctioning of the misconduct. This study aims to illuminate the real occurrence... View Details