"How to commit fraud and get away with it: A Guide for CEOs"

From macroresilience:

Shorter Version

A strategy to maximise bonuses and avoid personal culpability:

• Don’t commit the fraud yourself.
• Minimise information received about the actions of your employees.
• Control employees through automated, algorithmic systems based on plausible metrics like Value at Risk.
• Pay high bonuses to employees linked to “stretch” revenue/profit targets.
• Fire employees when targets are not met.
• …..Wait.

Longer Version

CEOs and senior managers of modern corporations possess the ability to engineer fraud on an organisational scale and capture the upside without running the risk of doing any jail time. In other words, they can reliably commit fraud and get away with it.

Imagine that you are the newly hired CEO of a large bank and by some improbable miracle your bank is squeaky clean and free of fraudulent practises. But you are unhappy about this. Your competitors are making more profits than you are by embracing fraud and coming out ahead of you even after paying tens of billions of dollars in fines to the regulators. And you want a piece of the action. But you’re a risk-averse person and don’t want to risk spending any time in jail for committing fraud. So how can you achieve this outcome?

Obviously you should not commit any fraudulent acts yourself. You want your junior managers to commit fraud in the pursuit of higher profits. One way to incentivise this behaviour is to adopt what are known as ‘high-powered incentives’. Pay your employees high bonuses tied to revenue/profits and maintain hard-to-meet ‘stretch’ targets. Fire ruthlessly if these targets are not met. And finally, ensure that you minimise the flow of information up to you about how exactly how your employees meet these targets.

There is one problem with this approach. As a CEO, this allows you to use the “I knew nothing!” defense and claim ignorance about all the “deplorable” fraud taking place lower down the organisational food chain. But it may fall foul of another legal principle that has been tailored for such situations – the principle of ‘wilful blindness’ – “if there is information that you could have know, and should have known, but somehow managed not to know, the law treats you as though you did know it”. In a recent essay, Judge Rakoff uses exactly this principle to criticise the failure of regulators in the United States in prosecuting senior bankers.

But wait – all hope is not lost yet. There is one way by which you as a CEO can not only argue that adequate controls and supervision were in place and at the same time make it easier for your employees to commit fraud. Simply perform the monitoring and control function through an automated system and restrict your role to signing off on the risk metrics that are the output of this automated system.

It is hard to explain how this can be done in the abstract so let me take a hypothetical example from the mortgage origination and securitisation industry. As a CEO of a mortgage originator in 2005, you are under a lot of pressure from your shareholders to increase subprime originations....MUCH MORE

HT: naked capitalism