Accounting scandals
Executive and managerial motivations for fraud

An executive can reduce the price of his company's stock due to information asymmetry. He can: accelerate accounting of expenses, delay accounting of revenue, engage in off balance sheet transactions to make the company seem less profitable, or simply report very low estimates of future earnings. Executives may do this to make a company a more attractive takeover target. When the company is bought for less, the acquirer profits from the executive's actions to surreptitiously reduce the share price. This can represent tens of billions of dollars (questionably) transferred from former shareholders to the acquirer. The executive is then rewarded with a golden handshake for presiding over the firesale that can sometimes be in the hundreds of millions of dollars for one or two years of work. Managerial opportunism plays a large role in these scandals.
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