Clark Keeler, Director of Forensic Investigations, Corporate Governance, and Risk Management Practices, is a financial executive with broad experience in leading both finance and operations teams. He has proven his leadership capabilities in directing complex projects in diverse industries and organizational environments. His expertise is focused on identifying, mitigating and managing organizational and fraud risk, while improving existing infrastructure, systems and internal controls. He is a skilled strategist with a long track record of successfully helping clients assess risk, identify and implement cost and process improvements, and create new business opportunities.



Mr. Keeler’s practice emphasizes risk management through the integration of fraud prevention, strong internal controls with process improvements or design, and the optimization of internal financial systems.































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Friday, April 16, 2010

Goldman Sachs

I've been questioning why no fraud indictments have come out of the market meltdown that started two years ago. I mean, every bubble is fueled by greed, and greed has a tendency to fuel fraud. How could there not be fraud?

We seemed to think that Enron and Worldcom executives overstepped their ethical responsibilities enough to create indictments earlier in the decade. We even found the practice of option backdating heinous enough to require indictments of the perpetrators. So, I've been cynically curious as to why our leaders in the financial markets were being spared the same scrutiny.

Well, maybe the wait is over. As Yves Smith so nicely states:

"SEC Sues Goldman for Fraud

Oooh, things are starting to get interesting.

A number of journalists and commentators (yours truly included) have taken issue with the fact that some dealers (most notably Goldman and DeutscheBank) had programs of heavily subprime synthetic collateralized debt obligations which they used to take short positions. Needless to say, the firms have been presumed to have designed these CDOs so that their short would pay off, meaning that they designed the CDOs to fail. The reason this is problematic is that most investors would assume that a dealer selling a product it had underwritte was acting as a middleman, intermediating between the views of short and long investors. Having the firm act to design the deal to serve its own interests doesn’t pass the smell test (one benchmark: Bear Stearns refused to sell synthetic CDOs on behalf of John Paulson, who similarly wanted to use them to establish a short position. How often does trading oriented firm turn down a potentially profitable trade because they don’t like the ethics?)"
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/04/sec-sues-goldman-for-fraud.html

...so maybe, just maybe, we may see some people held accountable. Goldman, Lehman Brothers. Do we really think there were only two? It could be refreshing, for a short period, though as a fraud investigator, I can only figure that is it will be another footnote in capitalist history along a very long road.

But we need single out some of the worst each offenders each time a bubble creates these abuses. Without establishing some semblance of risk for the perpetrators, there really is no reason at all not to take advantage of the system
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