Sample op-ed

The corporate crime wave is in full swing. Every week, it seems, there is another example of a company where a few top executives cooked the books to make a fortune and cheated workers and shareholders out of their retirement savings.

And while our politicians have taken up this problem of corporate greed run amok with surprising zeal, they are approaching it through the narrow lens of the stock market and the November elections, looking for a short-term fix to restore confidence in the market so they can get re-elected.

If our politicians are serious about curbing corporate greed, they must take a longer term approach and look at the systemic problems in the way corporations are run. And when they do, what they will see is a largely unregulated structure where a chummy group of insiders play fast and loose with the jobs and investments of millions.

So, what can we do to change this system?

First, there needs to be consequences for misbehavior. And not just a slap on the wrist and a few years in a minimum security country club. Executives should be forced to pay back their ill-gotten gains to the employees and investors. Their expensive homes and other assets should be seized. First time drug offenders wind up with five years in prison. Corporate criminals who wreck the lives of thousands often serve no time.

Though executives deserve most of the blame, they are not the only ones responsible. Directors are supposed to look out for the health of the company, not just rubber stamping the self-enriching compensation schemes of top management. Accountants and lawyers -- both of whom have high professional standards -- should also act as checks on crooked behavior instead of facilitating it. Such aiders and abettors should also be held responsible and be required to return the money they made through fraud. Lawyers and accountants should lose their professional licenses. Directors should be banned from serving on other boards.

Stiff penalties are crucial, but they're meaningless if there is nobody out there to enforce the law. President Bush has proposed a task force on corporate crime, but he has neither expanded the funding nor added any staff for this task force. Many of these fraud cases are complicated and take lots of time and resources. After all, corporations have legal teams that drug offenders could only dream of having. When politicians say they are getting tough on street crime they hire more policeman. Why don't they do that for suite crime?

Another important tool for cracking down on corporate crime is to empower whistleblowers. Many employees at large corporations are actually good, honest people who know right from wrong. But because current whistleblower protection laws are wholly inadequate, employees who want to report wrongdoing at their companies risk their jobs and, often, their careers. Toughening whistleblower protections will help give honest people the courage to do the right thing by pointing out fraud and other wrongdoing.

We also need to do a better job of aligning executives with the long-term health of their companies by eliminating incentives for unsustainable short-term growth, like millions of stock options that can be cashed anytime (and aren't even reflected in the company's books)

But the most important thing we must do is to recognize that the recent corporate scandals are more than just a temporary blight on stock market prosperity that politicians can address by passing minor reforms to be used as re-election props.

These corporate scandals offer a widening glimpse into a rigged system that is not working for a vast majority of Americans. Politicians ignore the systemic problems at their own peril.

Microsoft Word version