Your opinion

read each paragraph and give me your opinion if you agree or disagree with it

Gathering evidence from financial corporations was more difficult back in the 2000s than what it is now. In 2018, technology is utilized by almost every business across the country. Therefore, a technique to gather the evidence in a subpoena to audit their digital books quarterly using a program that compares the numbers the report and the numbers in their accounts. When citizens buy new cars or make big purchases, it can be discovered by other institution by looking at our credit scores. If this task force or congress can require the same kind of deal, then the task force can monitor their purchases or income and compare to the numbers they put in their books. This will provide a more transparent way of operating a business and leaves little room for corruption. Another technique that can be utilized by members of the task force is to perform thorough quarterly audits of business practices and the numbers they are reporting to their shareholders and public records. I feel that auditing only after suspicion is suspected is too late and the crime could be covered up. If the audits were done more routinely, than the crime can be caught and actions taken abruptly. Although this would require a very hefty task force to do, I feel it would serve better justice and advert another recession in our country. The challenges the task force does face is the amount of evidence that has to be combed through. Businesses have thousands of transactions annually. Each one of these transactions has to be recorded and accounted for. This causing a robust paper trail. When the agent has to look through this mass amount of data, this can take days or weeks to complete. This slows down efficiency and reading numbers all day can lead someone to miss the needle in the haystack they are looking for. Another challenge is knowing when a crime is committed. When the housing market crashed, the public did not know what crime was committed until after the market crashed and the recession began. The crimes in financial business can be masked by the moral position of the company. For example, if there is a company known for humanitarian work and changing lives of millions of people, the DOJ might be hesitant to investigate any wrong doing. How would it look if our government took down a business that was known for its charitable contributions? Even though a crime is known or suspected of being committed. These moral matters can cause a big challenge for the Agency and Task Force. I do not believe the Sarbanes-Oxley Act changed the integrity of businesses today. Businesses do not want to shutdown nor do the employees or share holders want to go to prison or lose money. Therefore, lying under oath to protect their books from being investigated in worth the risk. If a CEO is to go under oath and pledge the integrity of their reports, then the agents of the Bureau or whoever is investigating the company will take their word for it because of the prison time they are facing. Why would someone risk the chance of going to prison over their business? This is the question an investigator could ask themselves. Therefore, this actually weakens the threat of justice to businesses of enforcing this law. I do feel the DOJ does have a double standard for criminals who commit acts that are in a Wall Street type business and for someone who is averaged class citizen but they both commit the same act just on a different degree. For example, in the Enron Case, Arthur Anderson LLC was hired to audit the books for Enron and to assure the share holders of the integrity of the amount of liabilities the company had. However, they did not report the 40 Billion Dollar in liabilities that the company was hiding from the investors. Arthur Anderson was punished for their negligence in the case. Now looking at the housing markets, and the way the banks create a “bubble”for what the price of the homes or property are appraised at, this creates a big issue for when the bubble is corrected. The housing bubble is created off of demand for properties in our country. There is no set value and this is what caused the housing market to crash. Houses that were worth $200,000 when the bubble was at its peak, but then changed to $150,000 over night caused the owners of the house to not be able to afford to sell their house. This caused many homeowners to attempt to refinance but were not able to because of the banks not having any money left after the bubble had corrected. This caused the recession but no bank or wall street executive was held responsible for the giant mistake that ruined many lives. If the DOJ would hold the banks or the financial industry to the same level they held Arthur Anderson LLC, then the crisis could have been averted.

As an agent with the Wall Street Financial Crimes Task Force on the case I would suggest that we try to figure out what charges we could have against the accused.As we break down what white collar crimes we may have to work with we can then develop teams to work towards being able to get all the documents (subpoenas) necessary so that evidence could becollected. I think it is important for all evidence to be collected at the same time (office and home of all parties being accused); this would eliminate any opportunity for those involved to destroy any evidence that could lead to convictions. With the amount of evidence that will have to be prioritized we can assigned each group to then break into teams within each group so that the evidence can be filed and noted as worthy of being official court evidence or discarded.

I think challenges that may arise is the information that will be evident in the evidence. As many white-collar Wall Street crimes, they are deeply woven into much higher reaches than just Wall Street. With having to use so many agencies (local, state and federal), it can be difficult to investigate which law takes precedent among the others. Investigating such high players can shed light on the relationships they shared and the reasons they shared those relationships. I think on an investigatory level, there can be local, state and federal agents whom would have to press charges accordingly which may involve people whom were not on the first draft of those accused.

I believe initially the Sarbanes-Oxley Act enhanced the integrity of the financial markets and the quality of financial reporting. I think the crash showed many bankers and those in the financial field that their actions can have some serious consequences. However, I think due to the lack of punishment and convictions being made it has allowed for there to be some poor decision making. Recently, Wells Fargo was in trouble for having their employees sign up their customers for credit cards and checking accounts without their consent (The Week). Supervisors would pressure employees to meet sales quotas and to do so they created the fake accounts, fake credit cards and even fake pin codes. There were roughly 2 million accounts dating back to 2011. While Wells Fargo was ordered to pay fines totaling $185 million and executives were fired, no one was sentenced to jail time (The Week). I feel the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was designed to mainly please the people while there are still bankers with their millions of dollars as banks are ordered to pay the fines and not those who are guilty of leading the crimes that were being committed.

I believe the DOJ has a double standard for the rule of law. I think there are many levels to white collar crimes. While there are major busts and sometimes there are convictions that result in jail time more often than not, there is no real punishment for those of the elite financial and political managerial class. Given the recession almost 10 years ago and how there were no arrests and for Wells Fargo to still manage to create fake accounts costing people roughly $1.5 million in fee’s alone and again, have no arrests; it speaks volumes to me as a citizen on the ineffectiveness the DOJ is doing when it comes to white collar crimes and those who are involved in them.