The decisive convictions of former Enron leaders Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling put an exclamation point on a government crackdown on fraud--sparked by the energy giant's stunning 2001 collapse into bankruptcy.
Yet, wrongdoing hasn't vanished from the executive suite. In 2005, 52 percent of employees surveyed by the nonprofit Ethics Resource Center said they had seen improper behavior on the job that year, about the same as in years past. "The percentage of people who are interested in cheating is probably the same as 10,000 years ago," said Timothy Fort, business ethics professor at George Washington University. "I don't think there's any fix for that."
But the crackdown that began with Enron's downfall has produced concrete results. A White House task force on corporate fraud said it had garnered more than 1,000 guilty pleas and convictions since mid-2002, including those of 167 chief executives and corporate presidents.
More pressure has come as the result of public revulsion at the criminal excesses, which in turn prompted the passage of laws establishing new criminal penalties for stock fraud and 2002's Sarbanes-Oxley. That law requires auditors to evaluate the internal controls at companies and increases executive accountability. Such laws have changed the behavior of both executives and board members.
Source: The Los Angeles Times, May 25, 2006