Introduction The 2017 Equifax data breach stands as a chilling reminder of the vulnerabilities inherent in modern data-driven organizations and the severe repercussions for the affected individuals. This case study delves into the legal, ethical, and business implications of the breach, examining the areas of failure and potential best practices. Legal Compliance vs. Ethical Conduct Legal Compliance: The Equifax breach potentially violated several data security and privacy laws, such as consumer protection statutes and state-specific regulations. Failure to adhere to industry standards and regulations designed to safeguard consumer data can give rise to legal liability, leading to civil lawsuits and federal agency investigations. Legal but …show more content…
Transparency: Immediate and clear communication of the breach to all stakeholders, including consumers, regulators, and business partners. Accountability: Accepting full responsibility, taking swift remedial action to mitigate harm, and offering generous, unhindered support to affected consumers. Integrity: Ensuring senior executives face consequences for negligence and restructuring compensation priorities to favor consumer protection. Effect on Equifax's Competitive Position and Future Success The Equifax breach irrevocably tarnished the company's reputation, jeopardizing consumer trust essential for credit reporting agencies. This reputational damage likely resulted in lost business opportunities and a decline in market share relative to competitors. Moreover, the massive fines and settlement costs placed a significant financial burden on the company, potentially hindering investments in innovation and further security enhancements. The success of Equifax in the future depends heavily upon demonstrating a deep commitment to regaining
One year ago, on September 8, 2016 the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau(CFPB), the Los Angeles City Attorney and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) fined Wells Fargo Bank $185 million, alleging that more than 2 million bank accounts or credit cards were opened or applied for without customers' knowledge or permission between May 2011 and July 2015. This essay will discuss the Wells Fargo scandal by explaining how the event happened and describing how the organization approached handling a response to the crisis. This will be seen, firstly by describing the how the scandal happened, and what were the causes, secondly by discussing the reaction of the company in front of the situation, how they dealt with the crisis and then
Dodd-Frank and Sarbanes-Oxley Acts are important legislations in the corporate world because of their link to public and privately held companies. Sarbanes-Oxley Act was enacted to enhance transparency and accountability in publicly traded companies. On the contrary, Dodd-Frank Act was enacted to disentangle the confused web of financial service company valuations. Actually, these valuations are usually hidden by complex and unclear financial instruments. The introduction of Sarbanes-Oxley Act was fueled by recent incidents of accounting frauds by top executives of major corporations such as Enron. In contrast, Dodd-Frank Act was enacted as a response to the tendency by banks, insurance companies, hedge funds, rating agencies, and accounting companies to serve up harmful offer of ruined assets and liabilities brought by systemic non-disclosure (Anand, 2011, p.1). While these regulations have some similarities and differences, they have a strong relationship with the financial markets.
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act was drafted to encourage and protect whistleblowers from retaliation after the fraud scandal that cause the collapse of Enron in 2001. In a 2010 Senate Report found that “external auditors detected only 4.1 percent of uncovered fraud schemes, “whistleblower tips detected 54.1% of uncovered fraud schemes in public companies” and were thirteen times more effective than external audits” (Turpan, 2016). Whistleblowers serve an important service to the public and are more effective than external audits. The CFAA has been used to by employers to retaliate against employees who act as informants for agencies like Internal Revenue Service or Security Exchange Commission to expose fraud. There employees, not to their financial gain, gather information as evidence of fraud by the company. With a broad interpretation of CFAA, the employee would "exceed their authority" and was "unauthorized" to access the information, therefore allowing the company to hide their illegal
Wells Fargo is the third largest bank holding business in the United States. They were established in 1852, and have been widely trusted and generally scandal free since their company began doing business (Wells Fargo, 2016). That is, until July of 2016. In 2016 it was revealed that Wells Fargo’s employees were creating fraudulent accounts in peoples’ names without their permission or knowledge. The damages were severe, and the company has had to completely rebuild their reputation. While the company received a lot of social stigma through their fiasco, their finances were surprisingly unchanged. While the company is still dealing with the publicity of the scandal, they are handling it gracefully, and with the policies that they
Throughout the past several years major corporate scandals have rocked the economy and hurt investor confidence. The largest bankruptcies in history have resulted from greedy executives that “cook the books” to gain the numbers they want. These scandals typically involve complex methods for misusing or misdirecting funds, overstating revenues, understating expenses, overstating the value of assets or underreporting of liabilities, sometimes with the cooperation of officials in other corporations (Medura 1-3). In response to the increasing number of scandals the US government amended the Sarbanes Oxley act of 2002 to mitigate these problems. Sarbanes Oxley has extensive regulations that hold the CEO and top executives responsible for the numbers they report but problems still occur. To ensure proper accounting standards have been used Sarbanes Oxley also requires that public companies be audited by accounting firms (Livingstone). The problem is that the accounting firms are also public companies that also have to look after their bottom line while still remaining objective with the corporations they audit. When an accounting firm is hired the company that hired them has the power in the relationship. When the company has the power they can bully the firm into doing what they tell them to do. The accounting firm then loses its objectivity and independence making their job ineffective and not accomplishing their goal of honest accounting (Gerard). Their have been 379 convictions of fraud to date, and 3 to 6 new cases opening per month. The problem has clearly not been solved (Ulinski).
“Most people in the U.S. want to do the right thing, and they want others to do the right thing. Thus, reputation and trust are important to pretty much everyone individuals and organizations. However, individuals do have different values, attributes, and priorities that guide their decisions and behavior. Taken to an extreme, almost any personal value, attribute, or priority can “cause” an ethical breach (e.g. risk taking, love of money or sta...
The author appear to be moderately perplexed by the fact that American state that they are concerned about privacy but they yet disclose personal information to entities. I would offer that the reason many are disclosing the information, is that business will not offer their services or product without the personal information. One can go to another vendor for service, only to have the same problem repeated. Now what is perplexing, is the authors claim that “a significant number, 11%” (Caftori & Teicher, 2002) of the population believes that corporate owners should go to prison for violations of information privacy. I must say, I never thought of 11% of a population as a significant percentage, but I am just a student. More confusion for the authors is when a computer system that handles big data has faulty output. They use the analogy of an airline, and if they lose your luggage and should receive compensation, but this is not the case when the DMV provides faulty data. This should not be perplexing, with the airline an explicit contract is made with the purchase of the ticket. The airline is transport my body and my luggage to the agreed location without damage or loss. Luggage is tangible. The contents are worth x amount of dollars and the airline pays the individual
The personal connection Americans have with their phones, tablets, and computers; and the rising popularity of online shopping and social websites due to the massive influence the social media has on Americans, it is clear why this generation is called the Information Age, also known as Digital Age. With the Internet being a huge part of our lives, more and more personal data is being made available, because of our ever-increasing dependence and use of the Internet on our phones, tablets, and computers. Some corporations such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook; governments, and other third parties have been tracking our internet use and acquiring data in order to provide personalized services and advertisements for consumers. Many American such as Nicholas Carr who wrote the article “Tracking Is an Assault on Liberty, With Real Dangers,” Anil Dagar who wrote the article “Internet, Economy and Privacy,” and Grace Nasri who wrote the article “Why Consumers are Increasingly Willing to Trade Data for Personalization,” believe that the continuing loss of personal privacy may lead us as a society to devalue the concept of privacy and see privacy as outdated and unimportant. Privacy is dead and corporations, governments, and third parties murdered it for their personal gain not for the interest of the public as they claim. There are more disadvantages than advantages on letting corporations, governments, and third parties track and acquire data to personalized services and advertisements for us.
The issue of privacy breaching relates to the legal environment of business because every company and business holds information about its employees, customers, suppliers and other stakeholders. On top of all the information they store on other people, most companies have all their own business information kept on computers and files as well. If there were to be a breach in a company then all of the information they had stored in their systems could be stolen and sold to others. There would be major identity theft, social security fraud and even financial losses. Security breaches have become a significant risk for most businesses today. Security breaches can disrupt business operations, damage brand reputation and customer relationships, and attract government investigations and class action lawsuits.
The reason why I chose to discuss the Target Breach because I’m currently a Target credit and debit Red Card cardholders. Although I was not affected by the security breach, I was very disappointed in how Target handled the situation. If I was one of the individuals that the breach happens to, I would like to be told of the breach right away, so I could have notified my bank, credit card companies, and put a warning of fraud to all three credit reporting agency.
Price and Sorrells shows that companies are taking too much advantage from the customer, the government, even though their trying, needs to start helping the people protect their privacy, and a balance between the amount of trust people should have giving out their sensitive records to which information is protected. A concern that is happening that the government and corporations is that personal information is not secured well enough. Price states how over 100 million sensitive records were hacked or lost in a year and the percent of increase in data breaches is 650 more than last year. Her description of how unreliable the government is with personal information by using logical and well researched information to put no faith and fear in the reader.
"This is why the market keeps going down every day - investors don't know who to trust," said Brett Trueman, an accounting professor from the University of California-Berkeley's Haas School of Business. As these things come out, it just continues to build up"(CBS MarketWatch, Hancock). The memories of the Frauds at Enron and WorldCom still haunt many investors. There have been many accounting scandals in the United States history. The Enron and the WorldCom accounting fraud affected thousands of people and it caused many changes in the rules and regulation of the corporate world. There are many similarities and differences between the two scandals and many rules and regulations have been created in order to prevent frauds like these. Enron Scandal occurred before WorldCom and despite the devastating affect of the Enron Scandal, new rules and regulations were not created in time to prevent the WorldCom Scandal. Accounting scandals like these has changed the corporate world in many ways and people are more cautious about investing because their faith had been shaken by the devastating effects of these scandals. People lost everything they had and all their life-savings. When looking at the accounting scandals in depth, it is unbelievable how much to the extent the accounting standards were broken.
In today’s day and age, there is a lot of news that is related to corporate accounting fraud as companies intentionally manipulate their financial statements to show a better picture of their financial health. The objective of financial reporting is to provide financial information about a company to its various stakeholders such as investors and creditors so that these stakeholders can make decisions accordingly. Companies can show a better image of their financial well being by providing misleading information. This can be done by omitting material information from the books or deceitful appropriation of assets such as inventory theft, payroll fraud, check forgery or embezzlement. Fraudulent financial reporting will have an effect on the
However, the same personal data is being compromised and eroding privacy. Companies have been getting bolder in their attempts to gather, share and sell data. The latest trend is outsourcing data to third party companies for data processing, which can be done at a lower cost. One of the main problems with this approach is that a lot of very sensitive data is being sent, which could be harmful in the wrong hands. Most companies require their customers to "opt-out" to prevent their data from being shared with a company's affiliates. This process requires the customer to explicitly tell the company not to share their data, which is usually in the form of a web site or a survey sent in the mail. These surveys are often thrown away by consumers, so they don't even realize that they're giving the companies a green light to sell and share their data.
Foxman, E. R., & Kilcoyne, P. (n.d.). Information technology, marketing practice, and consumer privacy: ethical issues. Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, 12(1), 106-119.