21st Century Corporate Financial Fraud, United States, 2005-2010

The Corporate Financial Fraud project is a study of company and top-executive characteristics of firms that ultimately violated Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) financial accounting and securities fraud provisions compared to a sample of public companies that did not. The fraud firm sample was identified through systematic review of SEC accounting enforcement releases from 2005-2010, which included administrative and civil actions, and referrals for criminal prosecution that were identified through mentions in enforcement release, indictments, and news searches. The non-fraud firms were randomly selected from among nearly 10,000 US public companies censused and active during at least one year between 2005-2010 in Standard and Poor's Compustat data. The Company and Top-Executive (CEO) databases combine information from numerous publicly available sources, many in raw form that were hand-coded (e.g., for fraud firms: Accounting and Auditing Enforcement Releases (AAER) enforcement releases, investigation summaries, SEC-filed complaints, litigation proceedings and case outcomes). Financial and structural information on companies for the year leading up to the financial fraud (or around year 2000 for non-fraud firms) was collected from Compustat financial statement data on Form 10-Ks, and supplemented by hand-collected data from original company 10-Ks, proxy statements, or other financial reports accessed via Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval (EDGAR), SEC's data-gathering search tool. For CEOs, data on personal background characteristics were collected from Execucomp and BoardEx databases, supplemented by hand-collection from proxy-statement biographies.