engelberg - Toshiba
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ENGELBERG ESSAY GALLEYSFINAL
8/25/2016 11:36 AM
Reining in a Culture of Fraud: Adopting Incentive-Based
Regulations to Reform Corporate Governance in Japan
INTRODUCTION
On July 21, 2015, Toshiba’s CEO Hisao Tanaka announced that he was
resigning from the corporation to take responsibility for his involvement in an
accounting scandal that caused Toshiba to overstate its profits by
approximately $1.2 billion USD.1 The fraud resulted from of a top-down effort
by Toshiba’s employees to inflate the company’s net income.2 Top executives
at Toshiba set almost impossible profit targets, and pressured employees to
meet those targets by any means, including the fraudulent inflation of profits.3
A lack of internal controls, combined with a corporate culture that demands
strict obedience to management decisions, resulted in a fraudulent inflation
scheme spanning over a seven-year period.4 The scandal was ultimately
uncovered when Japan’s securities watchdog, the Securities and Exchange
Surveillance Commission (“SESC”), launched a probe into Toshiba’s
accounting practices and discovered the misconduct.5
Toshiba’s fraudulent accounting scandal was not an isolated incident
among Japanese corporations. A multitude of accounting fraud scandals
regarding overstating profits have occurred in Japan: the Olympus Corporation
for $1.7 billion USD in 2011, IHI Corp. for $4.6 billion USD in 2007, Nikko
Cordial Corp. for $13.7 billion USD in 2006, and Kanebo Ltd. by 210 billion
Yen in 2004.6 Accounting scandals, like the above mentioned, have serious
economic implications on companies and investors.7 It is not unusual for such
1 J. William Carpenter, Toshiba’s Accounting Scandal: How It Happened, INVESTOPEDIA (Aug. 13,
2015), http://investopedia.com/articles/investing/081315/toshibas-accounting-scandal-how-it-happened.asp.
2 Id.
3 Id.
4 Id.
5 John Boyd, Key Questions in Toshiba Scandal Still Unanswered, AL JAZEERA (Oct. 15, 2015, 6:24