The SEC took far fewer, but higher value, enforcement actions against individuals and firms involved in financial reporting during the last year of the Biden administration than it had for the two years prior. The agency took 45 actions related to potential accounting and auditing misconduct in fiscal year 2024 that ended Sept. 30, representing a 46% decline from the…
The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced settled fraud charges against Ideanomics, Inc., formerly known as Seven Stars Cloud Group, Inc., and its former Chairman and CEO, Zheng (Bruno) Wu, for misleading the public about the company’s financial performance between 2017 and 2019. The SEC also announced settled charges against Ideanomics’ current CEO, Alfred Poor, and former CFO, Federico Tovar,…
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Monday filed charges against Nigerian businessman Dozy Mmobuosi and three companies of which he is CEO, alleging they inflated the financial performance of the companies and key subsidiaries to defraud investors. The SEC said in a statement that it filed charges in U.S. District Court in New York against Mmobuosi, who made…
The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged David Pope, a rail freight trader formerly employed by agricultural cooperative CHS Inc., for manipulating the values and quantities of certain of the company’s rail freight contracts. In December 2018, CHS restated its publicly filed financial statements from 2014 through 2018 to correct errors caused by Pope. As alleged by the SEC, Pope…
he Securities and Exchange Commission today charged Granite Construction, Incorporated and its former Senior Vice President, Dale Swanberg, with fraud for inflating the financial performance of the major subdivision Swanberg managed. In 2021, Granite restated its financial statements from 2017 through 2019 to correct revenue and profit margin errors allegedly caused by Swanberg’s misconduct. The company agreed to pay $12…
Wild news in the Covid-19 world today: Vaccine maker Moderna has fired its new CFO one day into the job, after the executive’s previous employer disclosed in an SEC filing that it had launched an investigation into fraudulent financial reporting. Moderna disclosed the departure of Jorge Gomez in a terse press release issued Wednesday morning. His firing, the company said,…
The Securities and Exchange Commission’s review of companies’ earnings per share has brought cases against three firms over the past year or so, and could come into greater focus under the regulator’s new leadership. The initiative, launched a few years ago, reviews earnings per share for the majority of U.S. public companies at least once a year, looking to spot…
Researchers from a trio of universities (Washington State, Pennsylvania State, and Miami) studied 250 companies involved in Securities and Exchange Commission fraud filings from 2005 to 2013, and found that Fortune 500 companies were much more likely to have cooked books. Researchers looked closely for predictors of fraud, and found four risk factors : Fortune 500 companies (four times more…
The founder of cyberfraud prevention company NS8 Inc. was accused by federal prosecutors of raising more than $100 million for the firm by misleading investors about the state of its finances. NS8 said it is cooperating with investigators and has learned that the founder and former chief executive officer, Adam Rogas, “fabricated” much of its revenue, leaving it “working to…
The Securities and Exchange Commission today filed settled actions against two public companies for violations that resulted in the improper reporting of quarterly earnings per share (EPS) that met or exceeded analyst consensus estimates. The actions are the first arising from investigations generated by the Division of Enforcement’s EPS Initiative, which utilizes risk-based data analytics to uncover potential accounting and…