Former HealthSouth CFO’s, convicted felons and cooperating witnesses Aaron Beam and Weston Smith have parlayed their notoriety into a second career, and found a way to make fraud pay off in the end. For followers of this story, it might be worth noting which of the conspirators have joined hands to make this ersatz fraud-fighting team. Beam rode his night-school CPA on a magic carpet ride that would make him a multi-millionaire before his small startup medical rehab company became too unwieldy for his talents and he accepted the HealthSouth fraud-laced golden parachute, and then sat it out in high-living style until the Feds came calling. And Smith was over-promoted into service only when HealthSouth was running out of fraud-aware accountants in the CFO pool. He then blew the whistle only when things became too hot after he had accepted a deal that would have allowed him to be the head of a “clean” division of HealthSouth while still being able to pocket his fraud-inflated earnings. Smith was presumably OK with the fraud until Sarbanes-Oxley kicked the legs of deniability out from under him. He also had the unenviable task of keeping his Family-member wife off the list of indicted conspirators. So he talked and cried a little bit on the stand, and now, along with Beam, he has a new career.
Continue Reading–71 words [...]
|
|||||
|
The government, frothing at the mouth with frustration that gets spit out in the ooze of do-overs, is taking shots at Mike Martin’s and Ken Livesay’s sentences, as well as the more publicized example of government excess, the wistful reverberating blasts they’re taking at Scrushy and Siegelman. We want to believe that our government is generally acting in our best interests and on our behalf, and we generally count on them to solve problems that face our nation. When there are corporate scandals, we expect the government to interdict and set us back on the right course. Those of us who have been alive long enough know that our government is not without problems and that our hope for redemption is attached to a flawed system at best. But we like to think, we like to dream, that the men and women who are toiling on or behalf, who have perhaps made private sector sacrifices to live and work for the public they serve, are honestly working to better our world. We really want to believe in this vision, the vision of a government that is striving to take care of our needs while strengthening the Republic, just like we really want to believe in dreams and visions, like the one Richard Scrushy had that eventally became HealthSouth. I wrote in my previous entry that Jason Brown has filed for bankruptcy. Whereas the price of what happened out at HealthSouth has had devestating and far-reaching effects on many people, this was not one of them. Mr. Brown has not filed for bankruptcy, and I regret the error. |
|||||
|
Copyright © 2010 Report from Birmingham - All Rights Reserved |
|||||