Rewrite

1. During the HealthSouth Scandal, the CEO inflated the earnings of the company by $1.4 billion to please stockholders. He had staff make up numbers and transactions for 7 years before the SEC became suspicious. They became aware of this after HealthSouth sold $75 million in stock just one day before claiming a huge loss in the company. The company CEO was not convicted for accounting fraud but was convicted 7 years for another crime. 

2. I believe that is was unprofessional and unethical of the CEO to do what he did. Creating false earnings creates a false illusion of the state of the company to stockholders. These stockholders will lose huge amounts of money due to the inflated earnings. These issues could have been prevented by creating a system where there is a higher level of supervising over the accounting of the company. It would also help to have staff who value honesty and ethical behavior so that they could speak up about the suspicious actions required by their CEO. 

1. The scandal I have chosen to discuss is the HealthSouth scandal because of how pressure caused the CEO of the largest publicly traded health care to commit fraud. According to " The 10 Worst Corporate Accounting Scandals of All Time" PDF, the CEO felt pressured to meet of the stockholders, thus he inflated the earning numbers to 1.4 billion. Richard Scrushy told underlings to make up numbers and transactions for the years of 1996 to 2003. Richard was caught after he sold 7.5 million stocks a day before the company reported a huge loss which then triggered SEC to become suspicious. Richard was then convicted of fraud and got a sentence of 7 years of prison for bribing the governor of Alabama.

2. My thoughts about this scandal is that Richard should not have told underlings to fudge the numbers in order to get the numbers his stockholders would have liked. If Richard had just accepted the results, he probably would have avoided this scandal and jail time. This issue could have been prevented if Richard had just been honest about the numbers. Although the numbers were not enough to meet the expectations of the stockholders, it would not have hurt Richard to lose a couple of his stocks than to lose his company and receive jail time.