Wirecard CEO Markus Braun Resigns as Accounting Scandal Batters Shares (cnbc.com) 22
Wirecard CEO Markus Braun has stepped down amid a deepening accounting scandal that has rocked the company's share price. From a report: The German payments firm said in a brief statement Friday that Braun had resigned "with immediate effect" and that James Freis would take his place as interim CEO. It comes just one day after Wirecard admitted that auditors at EY couldn't find 1.9 billion euros ($2.1 billion) of cash on its balance sheet. The firm was forced to postpone its 2019 annual report -- the fourth time it has done so this year. It also warned on Thursday that, if it did not provide consolidated financials by Friday, approximately 2 billion in loans could be called in. There are fears the company could go insolvent by the weekend. Shares of the firm have collapsed in recent days. On Thursday, Wirecard stock plummeted more than 60%, while on Friday they fell as much as 45%. Wirecard shares pared some of their losses shortly after Braun's resignation was confirmed, but remained over 34% lower for the session.
How? (Score:3)
How the fuck do you lose track of 2 billion Euros?
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How the fuck do you lose track of 2 billion Euros?
Did they check the couch cushions in the lounge? If this keeps happening maybe they should strap one of those BLE beepers onto it.
Re:How? (Score:4, Funny)
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Though that still leaves the question how the fuck that happens.
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[In 2009,] Wirecard introduced ... a fraud prevention suite for fraud detection that also uses AI and machine learning. [wikipedia.org]
Wouldn't buy; apparently their AI doesn't work too well.
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a fraud prevention suite for fraud detection that also uses AI and machine learning.
apparently their AI doesn't work too well.
Their AI was probably intended to catch external customer fraud . . . not internal executive fraud.
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I guess it was never there in the first place... Wirecard was getting fêtedas such a success previously, looks like that needs to be reassessed?
Business Ethics (Score:5, Insightful)
I got my MBA a little after the ENRON scandal, and during the Great Recession. One of the course changes that happened with my class was an increased focus on Business Ethics. While it is easy to cover up a small lapse in ethics, the more you do it, it will at some point come out and become a large problem. However the problem is people get too comfortable with those small lapses, then it gets bigger and bigger.
Eg. Report sales once the product is on the truck being delivered. vs having the check on hand. Is a small lapse.
Then it reports the sale while it is on the loading dock
Then when it is being manufactured
When the order is taken.
Projected orders that will be taken. Now at this point you are so far past accounting that you are just making up numbers, and this is a major lapse in ethics.
Business leaders need to always be mindful of their ethics. As they are being paid and dealing with large amounts of money. It is easy to be careless and complacent. Allowing greed and fear to win out, vs running a legit ship. What makes it worse, is when a company runs ethically they have a good long term plan, however they are trying to compete against a bunch of companies that rise up and fizzle out quickly. So it is like a Marathon Runner racing against a set of Relay Runners.
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Business leaders need to always be mindful of their ethics. As they are being paid and dealing with large amounts of money. It is easy to be careless and complacent. Allowing greed and fear to win out, vs running a legit ship. What makes it worse, is when a company runs ethically they have a good long term plan, however they are trying to compete against a bunch of companies that rise up and fizzle out quickly. So it is like a Marathon Runner racing against a set of Relay Runners.
Everyone knows that if you neglect business ethics, you end up getting shot in the ass.
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Everyone knows that if you neglect business ethics, you end up getting shot in the ass.
"Everyone knows" this, yet I have not noticed any diminution of business fraud and other types of white-collar crime. I suspect this is because knowing a generality ("if you neglect business ethics, you end up getting shot in the ass") and believing a specificity ("if I do this, I'll get caught and go to prison") are two different things.
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Everyone knows that if you neglect business ethics, you end up getting shot in the ass.
"Everyone knows" this, yet I have not noticed any diminution of business fraud and other types of white-collar crime. I suspect this is because knowing a generality ("if you neglect business ethics, you end up getting shot in the ass") and believing a specificity ("if I do this, I'll get caught and go to prison") are two different things.
Just an FYI, it was a movie reference.
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If you book the sale before you actually get paid, then the payment goes through, you have a chance of having the lie clean up after itself. If you don't, though, now you have the option of either getting punished for your lie or doubling down with another little bit of epistemic creativity in order to find some way of covering that shortfall.
I assume that this issue often goes hand in hand with people's ability to tell increasingly au
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Normalization of Deviance.
It's killed a good many people in industry as well. If you are lucky it only wrecks equipment. The chemical safety board knows all about it.
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Absolutely this. Deciding that the weird sound your car makes is "the new normal" is a nearly guaranteed way to ensure you need new brakes or an engine at some point later. The same applied to NASA, where a normalization of deviance—"ehh, sure, the O-rings have some blow-out in low temperature testing, but we haven't actually had any problems yet in the real world"—was determined to be one of the key factors that contributed to Challenger exploding. The same applies in ethics as well. Let a litt
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Exactly. However I did seem to find a difference in general interests of Ethics for the MBA classes when it was Full Time MBA students (Most going to Grad school out of college) compared to the Evening MBA Students who where working full time and taking the class after work.
I found the Evening MBA students cared much more about ethics and showed more signs of ethical thinking.
Full Time MBA: Looking at the number for an assignment. "Well if we cut the workforce then we can increase profit margins"
Evening M
EY=Ernst and Young (Score:1, Informative)
EY is Ernst and Young (auditing firm) in case anyone cares.
Buy the dips! (Score:4, Funny)
On Thursday, Wirecard stock plummeted more than 60%, while on Friday they fell as much as 45%. Wirecard shares pared some of their losses shortly after Braun's resignation was confirmed, but remained over 34% lower for the session.
In related news, shares of Wirecard have exploded in popularity on the Robinhood investing app.
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In related news, shares of Wirecard have exploded in popularity on the Robinhood investing app.
Unfortunately however, another inconvenient downtime occurred whereby users were yet again locked out during critical trading hours. On the plus side, shortly before the outage a new way to get infinite leverage was found by one autist and the entire market cornered for $0.37 and an empty can of red bull.
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After the CEO is gone will there be others who may be trying to find a backer for the lost money. At such times might a backer, who is willing to sponsor 2.1b, get a very good deal out of it. So they may still bounce back. But it's speculation of course.
Let me guess, no jail time (Score:2)
And we keep wondering why they keep doing it.