How did the most trusted financial system in the world become the breeding ground for the massive corruption uncovered in the Enron and WorldCom scandals? The simple answer is greed. Farrell shows how incentive compensation for CEOs, combined with the decline of the American auditing industry, led to a series of spectacular accounting frauds, not just at Enron and WorldCom, but at other companies as well. Farrell details how a series of seemingly minor Congressional actions — from a law penalizing corporations for paying salaries in excess of $1 million to a Senate vote to scuttle a rule calling for the expensing of stock options — created the conditions that led to the accounting abuses that eventually brought gigantic corporations down. From publisher description.