Bob Jensen's Enron Quiz (and answers) --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudEnronQuiz.htm

What Accountants Need to Know --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#AccountantsNeedToKnow

Global Corruption (in legal systems) Report 2007 --- http://www.transparency.org/content/download/19093/263155

Tax Fraud Alerts from the IRS --- http://www.irs.gov/compliance/enforcement/article/0,,id=121259,00.html

White Collar Fraud Site --- http://www.whitecollarfraud.com/
Note the column of links on the left.

Bob Jensen's essay on the financial crisis bailout's aftermath and an alphabet soup of appendices can be found at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on fraud are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud.htm

From CNN:  Clark Howard's Informative Advice About Shopping, Financial Planning, and Warnings About Scams ---
http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/clark.howard/?iref=allsearch

Bob Jensen's warnings about scams ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm

Bob Jensen's shopping helpers ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm

Accounting Scandals
The funny thing is that I never looked up this item before now. Jim Mahar noted that it is a good link.

Accounting Scandals --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accounting_scandals

Bob Jensen's threads on accounting scandals are in various documents:

Accounting Firms --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud001.htm

Fraud Conclusion --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm

Enron --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudEnron.htm

Rotten to the Core --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm

Fraud Updates --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

American History of Fraud --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudAmericanHistory.htm

Fraud in General --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud.htm

AICPA Fraud Resource Center --- Click Here
http://www.aicpa.org/INTERESTAREAS/FORENSICANDVALUATION/RESOURCES/FRAUDPREVENTIONDETECTIONRESPONSE/Pages/fraud-prevention-detection-response.aspx

"New Report Shows Changing Fraud Environment," by Curtis C. Verschoor, AccountingWeb, March 18, 2013 ---
http://www.accountingweb.com/article/new-report-shows-changing-fraud-environment/221374

Today’s FBI: Facts and Figures 2013-2014—which provides an in-depth look at the FBI and its operations—is now available ---
http://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/todays-fbi-facts-figures/facts-and-figures-031413.pdf/view

Identity Theft Information and Tools from the AICPA and IRS ---
http://www.aicpa.org/interestareas/tax/resources/irspracticeprocedure/pages/idtheftinformationandtools.aspx

Tax practitioners and their clients are concerned about the growing epidemic of tax-related identity theft in America - both refund theft and employment theft. At the end of fiscal 2013, the IRS had almost 600,000 identity theft cases in its inventory, according tothe IRS National Taxpayer Advocate. 

The AICPA shares members' concerns about the impact of identity theft and offers the resources below to help them learn more about this issue and advise clients. We have provided recommendations to Congress and the IRS Oversight Board on ways to further protect taxpayers and preparers.

IRS Identity Protection Specialized Unit at 800-908-4490

Identity Theft Resource Center --- http://www.idtheftcenter.org/
Note the tab for State and Local Resources

The IRS has an Identity Theft Web Page at
http://www.irs.gov/uac/Identity-Protection

FTC Identity Theft Center --- http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/microsites/idtheft/

"IRS is overwhelmed by identity theft fraud:   Billions wrongly paid out as scammers find agency an easy target," by Michael Kranish, Boston Globe, February 16, 2014 ---
http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2014/02/16/identity-theft-taxpayer-information-major-problem-for-irs/7SC0BarZMDvy07bbhDXwvN/story.html

Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

The decision maker should review all charges from vendors. Time and time again vendors fail to give credit for returns or special price adjustments and the ever too present false charges to business credit cards cost companies.
Deadra Mayhew, CPA A CPA Secret to a Better Business
http://www.smartbrief.com/quote/01/10/14/better-bread-happy-heart-wealth-vexation#.VP2f5OFkZLc

Question
What government agencies art the biggest piñatas for millions of fraudster?

"GAO: Improper Government Payments Increased 18% in 2014, to $125 Billion;  EITC's 27% Error Rate Is Highest of Any Program," by Paul Caron, TaxProf Blog, March 18, 2015 ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2015/03/gao-improper-government-payments-increased-18-in-2014-to-125-billion-.html

Government-wide, improper payment estimates totaled $124.7 billion in fiscal year 2014, a significant increase of approximately $19 billion from the prior year’s estimate of $105.8 billion. The estimated improper payments for fiscal year 2014 were attributable to 124 programs spread among 22 agencies.

The increase in the 2014 estimate is attributed primarily to increased error rates in three major programs: the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Medicare Fee-for-Service and Medicaid programs, and the Department of the Treasury’s Earned Income Tax Credit program. These three programs accounted for $80.9 billion in improper payment estimates, or approximately 65 percent of the government-wide total for fiscal year 2014. Further, the increases in improper payment estimates for these three programs were approximately $16 billion, or 85 percent of the increase in the government-wide improper payment estimate for fiscal year 2014.

The EITC's 27.2% error rate is far greater than any of the listed government programs.

Jensen Comment
At best these can be considered educated guesses subject to enormous margins of error. One problem is that the GAO has deemed that auditing is impossible for some agencies prone to fraudulent spending such as the Pentagon and the IRS. Government agencies are enormous Piñatas for millions of fraudsters.

I watched a woman being interviewed by CBS News who spent (tax free) her mother's Social Security payments that were automatically deposited into a checking account. Her mother has been dead for over 30 years.

Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

How to Reduce Federal Loan Fraud by Accounting for Risks

A great place to start (at reducing Federal loan fraud) is the accounting for federal lending programs which deliberately understates their risks. Readers may have noticed that every time federal student-loan subsidies expand, liberals like Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) hail it as a taxpayer windfall. She gets away with this because administrative expenses and market risk aren’t included in the loan cost estimates.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/ending-federal-loan-fraud-1426030608?tesla=y

Measuring Student Debt and Its Performance PDF --- http://www.newyorkfed.org/research/staff_reports/sr668.pdf

In general student loans are subprime loans

Question
How do you repo a college education?

The nation’s student-loan balance climbed by $31 billion last quarter to $1.16 trillion. That makes it the largest source of debt after mortgages, which gained $39 billion to $8.2 trillion in the fourth quarter. Auto-loan debt increased by $21 billion to $955 billion.
"Student-Loan Delinquencies Rise in U.S.," by Jeanna Smialek, Bloomberg News, February 17, 2015 ---
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-17/student-loan-delinquencies-rise-in-u-s-as-education-debt-swells?cmpid=BBD021715&alcmpid=

(Bloomberg) -- Student-loan delinquencies increased at the end of 2014, a troubling sign that Americans are failing to keep up with payments as education debt climbs, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Data from the New York Fed released Tuesday showed 11.3 percent of student loans were delinquent in the final three months of 2014, up from 11.1 percent in the prior quarter. The share of auto loans at least 90 days overdue also rose, climbing to 3.5 percent from 3.1 percent the prior period, even as fewer credit card and mortgage loan payments were late.

“Although we’ve seen an overall improvement in delinquency rates since the Great Recession, the increasing trend in student-loan balances and delinquencies is concerning,” Donghoon Lee, research officer at the New York Fed, said in an e-mailed statement. “Student-loan delinquencies and repayment problems appear to be reducing borrowers’ ability to form their own households.”

The nation’s student-loan balance climbed by $31 billion last quarter to $1.16 trillion. That makes it the largest source of debt after mortgages, which gained $39 billion to $8.2 trillion in the fourth quarter. Auto-loan debt increased by $21 billion to $955 billion.

Education loan balances have skyrocketed over the past decade. In the first quarter of 2005, outstanding student debt stood at $363 billion -- about a third of the current level, based on a 2013 New York Fed report.

Delinquency rates for student loans probably understate the actual situation, according to today’s report. About half of the student loans are in deferment, in grace periods or in forbearance, temporarily removing them from the repayment cycle.

Education debt delinquency levels have come down since 2013, when the rate reached 11.8 percent, yet remain elevated from around 6 percent a decade ago, according to the New York Fed. Student loans are the type of debt most likely to be past-due, having surpassed credit-card delinquency rates in 2012.

Jensen Comment
When car and truck owners default a repo guy shows up in the dead of night and takes the vehicle to the bank. How do you repo a college education?

Unethical Publishers:  Among the dubious acts is selling open source materials

"New Predatory Publishing in Old Bottles," by Barbara Fister, Inside Higher Ed, March 9, 2015 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/library-babel-fish/new-predatory-publishing-old-bottles

Many academic authors by now have heard the phrase “predatory publishers.” It’s usually associated with a list of fraudulent  pseudo-publishing operations maintained by Jeffrey Beall, whose crusade to name and shame these shady opportunists has made it to The New York Times. What worries me far more than these fairly obvious scams are the emerging business practices being used by highly profitable publishers with long and distinguished pedigrees that are treating open access as a new revenue stream that can be both open and closed – earning money through subscriptions and author fees. (Monica Berger and and Jill Cirasella have just published an excellent article on why we need a broader understanding of predatory publishing practices.) But double-dipping isn't enough. Witness a blogger’s report that Elsevier (founded in 1880) is selling articles published by Wiley (founded in 1807) as open access articles. Elsevier’s PR team responded quickly by removing the article from its for-sale options. Apparently, though, the company continues to sell open access articles originally published by Wiley under the same terms.

So far as I can tell, here’s how it went down (and hat tip to David Flander for alerting me to this curious story): Whoever funded the author paid Wiley something like $3,000 to make the work open access. Wiley published it as an open access work, and then apparently turned around and licensed the same work for an unknown sum to Elsevier so that Elsevier could sell it through its Science Direct platform for upwards of $30.

Apparently through some clever language in the author agreement, Wiley retains the rights to license open access works for a fee under its contracts with authors when Wiley take money from them (or more accurately, from the authors’ funders) to make an article open access. Though it is an unethical practice on its face, it may be legal. Toward the bottom of the lengthy document is the phrase “Use of Wiley Open Access articles for commercial, promotional, or marketing purposes requires further explicit permission from Wiley and will be subject to a fee” (my emphasis).

It's entirely possible that mistakes were made, that giant publishers ingesting paid-for open access articles into massive piles of content that they license without noticing that some of it has had its freedom ransomed for a fee. It may be that bit of author agreement language got left in by mistake. It could be these publishers are so big and so deeply involved in swapping intellectual property rights that they are unable to keep their records straight, rather like those bankers who couldn't keep track of mortgages as they were bundled, rebundled and resold, contributing to a global financial catastrophe. Even if this relicensing and selling of open access articles was in error, it would be a worrying sign of incompetence by publishers who may well feel too big to fail. 

One of the McGuffins in this caper is the Creative Commons license under which these open access articles are published. The article first written about was published under a CC-NC-ND license, which is quite restrictive and, as such, made this commercial reuse seem a breach of contract - except for that pesky language in the agreement which seems to give Wiley the right to exploit the work commercially post-publication anyway. CC-BY allows anyone to reuse a work with attribution. A lot of scientists and scholars have argued the fewer restrictions on scholarly publications, the better, but it makes some scholars nervous.

I personally am in favor of reserving as few right as possible for my scholarly and even frivolous work (like this blog). Yes, at times I’ve been surprised to see where things I wrote turns up, but I haven't been harmed by this reuse. It’s my small way of shaking my fist at the many ways that copyright has been distorted by moneyed interests since the power to grant limited monopolies to authors to encourage creativity was granted to congress in the U.S. constitution. At the time, the copyright term was 14 years (with a one-time renewal) and it required action on the part of the copyright holder. Now everything is all rights reserved by default, unless you takes steps to reserve fewer than all rights, and the copyright term is much longer. Most of the cultural production of the past century is either copyrighted or potentially under a copyright held by people or companies you cannot identify to seek permission to use it. This is not what the founders had in mind when they gave Congress this tool "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.”

Likewise, reselling open access articles is not what the authors (or funders) of those articles intended. Fooling people into paying for open access articles is conduct unbecoming. Scholars, funding agencies, and the scholarly societies that often outsource their publishing program to commercial firms should hold publishers' feet to the fire and prohibit this triple dipping.   

Meanwhile, our best bet is to avoid predatory publishers, including those not on Beall’s list - Elsevier, Wiley, or any other “legitimate” publisher that knowingly or carelessly resells work that was intended by its authors to be available for free. It may be legal, but it isn’t right.  

Oligopoly Publishers With a History of Ripping Off Libraries and Universities Like Cornell With Guts Enough to Say No ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#ScholarlyJournals

From the CPA Newsletter on March 11, 2015 ---

Uniform accounting for muni bonds urged by SEC official ---
http://www.bondbuyer.com/news/washington-enforcement/gallagher-mandate-gasb-standards-possibly-by-linking-to-tax-exempts-1071238-1.html
Accounting standards should be applied uniformly to municipal bonds to improve transparency, said Daniel Gallagher, a member of the Securities and Exchange Commission. About two-thirds of the 30,000 largest state and local government-bond issuers follow practices recommended by the Governmental Accounting Standards Board, Gallagher said, and there's probably a lower rate of compliance among the remaining 20,000 smaller issuers. Reuters (3/10), The Bond Buyer (free content) (3/10)

"Former Pittsburg State (Kansas) finance professor pleads guilty to fraud," KAKE, March 4, 2015 ---
http://www.kake.com/home/headlines/Former-Pittsburg-State-professor-pleads-guilty-to-fraud-294996191.html

A former Pittsburg State University professor has admitted defrauding a Nigerian graduate student exchange program he led at the university out of more than $140,000.

The Joplin Globe reports 61-year-old Michael Muoghalu pleaded guilty Monday in federal court in Wichita to wire fraud and money laundering.

In exchange for the plea agreement, the prosecutor agreed to recommend a lower sentence. He will also be required to repay the university $148,430.

Prosecutors allege that beginning in 2006 Muoghalu worked with an unknown accomplice in Nigeria to persuade 15 Nigerian students to give him part of the refunds they received after they deposited money with the university for tuition and fees.

Muoghalu, who taught finance at the school for 23 years, resigned last September.

"Apple Pay Stung by Low-Tech Fraudsters:  Transactions involved credit-card data stolen in retailer breaches," by Robin Sidel and Daisuke Wakabayashi, The Wall Street Journal, March 5, 2015 ---
http://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-pay-stung-bylow-techfraudsters-1425603036?tesla=y

Turbo Tax Insiders Reveal "Dubious Practices" in Their Company (Intuit)

"Do Not Use TurboTax This Tax Season," Newsfeed, February 26, 2015 ---
http://newsfeed.gawker.com/do-not-use-turbotax-this-tax-season-1688222595

. . .

Robert Lee and Shane MacDougall, both former security executives at Intuit, spoke with KrebsOnSecurity.com about the company's dubious practices: Identity thieves have been creating fake accounts in droves to cash in on strangers' legitimate refunds. It's a simple maneuver: plug in someone else's Social Security number and other tax identification, then go through the same TurboTax steps as normal—only they bank the refund deposit, not you:

Lee said he was mystified when Intuit repeatedly refused to adopt some basic policies that would make it more costly and complicated for fraudsters to abuse the company's service for tax refund fraud, such as blocking the re-use of the same Social Security number across a certain number of TurboTax accounts, or preventing the same account from filing more than a small number of tax returns.
 

"If I sign up for an account and file tax refund requests on 100 people who are not me, it's obviously fraud," Lee said in an interview with KrebsOnSecurity. "We found literally millions of accounts that were 100 percent used only for fraud. But management explicitly forbade us from either flagging the accounts as fraudulent, or turning off those accounts."
 

It's a near perfect online scam: with hacked social security numbers and other personally identifying fragments flooding the web, fraudsters need only create a free TurboTax account to siphon away someone else's refund. And because TurboTax allows filers to pay for the price of the software with their refund before they actually receive it, there's no need to submit or falsify a credit card number—it's free money for both Intuit and crooks.

Continued in article

TurboTax is Suspected Since the Other Tax Preparation Software Has Not Yet Been Compromised
"FBI to Probe Fraudulent Tax Filings:   As States Move to Contain Bogus Returns Through TurboTax, Signs Emerge That Fraud May Involve Federal Filings," by Laura Saunders. Liz Moyer in New York, and Devlin Barrett, The Wall Street Journal, February 11, 2015 ---
http://www.wsj.com/articles/fbi-to-probe-fraudulent-tax-filings-1423614826

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has opened a probe to determine whether a computer data breach led to the filing of false tax returns through TurboTax software, according to a person familiar with the case.

The move comes as states try to contain a wave of bogus state tax filings through TurboTax amid signs that the fraud may also involve federal returns, according to some security specialists and taxpayers.

FBI investigators are still working to determine exactly how personal information was obtained to file bogus returns in about 19 states and whether that information may have been stolen from TurboTax or somewhere else, the person said.

TurboTax parent Intuit Inc. says it believes recent instances of fraud didn’t result from a breach of its systems, based on a preliminary examination conducted with the assistance of independent security experts.

“Tax fraud is an industrywide issue and Intuit is actively engaged with federal and state governments, as well as industry associations, to fight fraud,” the company said in a statement. “Intuit has not been notified, nor are we aware, that we are the target of an FBI investigation. We work with law-enforcement agencies, including the FBI as appropriate, on matters such as identity theft.”

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

Pension Ponzi Fraud:  Chicago = Detroit = Stockton

"Rahm Emanuel's Chicago Nears Fiscal Free Fall," Investors Business Daily, March 2, 2015 ---
http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/030215-741568-emanuels-chicago-nears-fiscal-free-fall.htm

. . .

Chicago's finances are staggering under the weight of an unfunded pension liability that Moody's Investors Service has estimated at $32 billion, eight times the city's operating revenue.

Chicago has a $300 million structural deficit. And Illinois law requires the city to up its 2016 contributions to its police and fire pension funds by $550 million.

"This is an unfortunate wake-up call for anyone still asleep over the fiscal cliff facing the city of Chicago," said Laurence Msall, president of the Chicago-based government finance watchdog, the Civic Federation.

The steady financial decline of the nation's third-largest city prompted us recently to say that Chicago was well on its way to becoming the next Detroit.

In other words, it's another bankrupt monument to the perils of Democratic governance: a one-party town in one of the bluest states, whose mayor, former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, learned financial discipline at the feet of President Barack Obama.

A large part of Chicago's problem is that the game of maintaining campaign armies by overpromising and underfunding pensions is over. Emanuel can expect little help from Illinois' new Republican governor, Bruce Rauner, who is trying to fix similar problems at the state level.

Chicago's pension funds are only 40% funded, and prospects aren't good, as people — particularly high-income individuals and businesses — flee the city's high taxes and stiff regulations.

Emanuel recently emerged from the Windy City's mayoral primary with just 45% of the vote against four opponents, forcing Chicago's first-ever mayoral runoff. A poll taken by local polling firm Ogden & Fry on Feb. 28 showed Emanuel leading second-place primary finisher Jesus "Chuy" Garcia, who serves on the Cook County Board of Commissioners, by a slim 42.9% to 38.5% margin. Chicago natives are clearly restless.

As Aaron Renn has noted in City Journal, Chicago lost 7.1% of its jobs in the first decade of this century. Its famous Loop, the second-largest business district in the nation, lost 18.6% of its private-sector positions.

Raising the city's minimum wage will not reverse that trend. People are leaving in droves, voting the only way they can in a one-party town — with their feet.

From 2000 to 2009, Chicago's population shrank by 200,000 — the only one of the nation's 15 largest cities to lose people. The city now has 145,000 fewer school-age children than it had more than a decade ago, according to district data, forcing the closure of about 100 schools since 2001.

Chicago may soon be forced to go to Washington for a bailout similar to New York City's 1975 rescue. The prospect of Emanuel begging his former boss, President Obama, for financial help would be ironic indeed.

The man who once said that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste now finds his city and President Obama's home town in fiscal crisis and his own political future teetering on the brink.

"New Scams Targeting University Employees," Inside Higher Ed, March 2, 2015 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/03/02/new-scams-targeting-university-employees

Faculty and staff at Carnegie Mellon University who last weekend clicked on a link in an e-mail titled "Your salary raise information" were disappointed when they didn't find a pay increase but an attempt to steal their personal information. The university has since warned the campus community against the phishing scam and locked down the compromised accounts, WPXI reported. 

Hackers often target university employees' wallets. In the last several months, the Research and Education Networking Information Sharing and Analysis Center, or REN-ISAC, has identified threats against university payroll systems and personal tax returns. The organization on Friday released a new advisory, warning colleges and universities about a "resurgence" in scams that involve fake wire transfers. In one version of the scam, a vice president at a university received an e-mail from a hacker impersonating the president asking for help with an outgoing wire transfer. REN-ISAC recommended university officers who can conduct wire transfers be suspicious of instructions sent by e-mail.

Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

That some bankers have ended up in prison is not a matter of scandal, but what is outrageous is the fact that all the others are free.
Honoré de Balzac

Bankers bet with their bank's capital, not their own. If the bet goes right, they get a huge bonus; if it misfires, that's the shareholders' problem.
Sebastian Mallaby. Council on Foreign Relations, as quoted by Avital Louria Hahn, "Missing:  How Poor Risk-Management Techniques Contributed to the Subprime Mess," CFO Magazine, March 2008, Page 53 --- http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/10755469/c_10788146?f=magazine_featured .

Jensen Question
Why do stockholders take a beating while the bad guys just go on scheming new crimes?

"JPMorgan is about to shell out $99.5 million to settle a currency rigging lawsuit," by Jonathan Stempel, Reuters, January 31, 2015 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/r-jpmorgan-to-pay-995-million-to-resolve-currency-rigging-lawsuit-2015-1 

Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

"More lawsuits in UNC academic scandal; whistleblower settles with university," by Sara Ganim, CNN, February 25, 2015 ---
http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/25/us/unc-academic-fraud/

Three more athletes who say they were scammed out of an education at the University of North Carolina are now suing over academic fraud, and the whistleblower who exposed the fake-class system has now settled her lawsuit with the university.

Former basketball player Kenya McBee has joined former football player Mike McAdoo's federal class-action lawsuit, claiming the university denied him and thousands of other athletes education when advisers forced him to take classes that never met.

Former basketball player Leah Metcalf, and former football player James Arnold filed a separate but similar class-action lawsuit in state court in North Carolina.

Ken Wainstein, who was hired by the university to act as an independent investigator, revealed in October that academic fraud had taken place at UNC for 18 years, and that UNC officials were wrong when they denied -- for nearly five years -- that anyone in athletics was involved.

Instead it was players, like McAdoo, who were blamed by the university for cheating and punished by the NCAA.

"All of these student-athletes were promised a legitimate UNC education, were implored to trust UNC academic advising, and were then guided into academically bereft courses against their interests," said attorney Jeremi Duru, one of the attorneys representing these athletes.

Earlier this year high-profile attorney Michael Hausfeld filed a class-action suit against UNC and the NCAA over the same scandal. About 3,100 students -- nearly half of them athletes -- who enrolled in the fake classes could easily join these lawsuits.

Mary Willingham, the whistleblower who began revealing details about the sham classes, accused UNC of retaliating against her before she quit last year, and then sued the university to get her job back.

Willingham told CNN that she reached a settlement agreement with the school this week, although it had not yet been approved by a judge. It would compensate her financially but not restore her job as a learning specialist and adviser.

Continued in article

Cheated
by Jay M. Smith and Mary Willingham
Potomac, 280 pages, $26.95

Book Review of Cheated
Dark Days in Chapel Hill:  If you ran a college and knew there was substantial money to be had from sports but no requirement to educate athletes, you might cut corners—that’s exactly what the University of North Carolina did for nearly two decades.

Mr. Smith is a history professor at the University of North Carolina, Ms. Willingham was for many years an academic counselor there who brought attention to the scandal by granting interviews to the Raleigh News & Observer. The authors accuse their state’s prestige public campus of “broad dishonesty” and of stocking its teams in football and men’s basketball—the “revenue sports”—with athletes to generate profit, then breaking its promise to educate them. Ms. Willingham resigned last year and later sued the school—a settlement was reached this week—and both authors recount being shunned in Chapel Hill for helping bring the scandal to light, so they may have an ax to grind. At times, their account flirts with a tone of “if only they’d listened to me.” Nonetheless “Cheated” sounds an important call for reform.

Details of the scheme confirm the worst fears about “student athletes,” at least as regards football and men’s basketball. (Other men’s and all women’s collegiate sports generally have good academic reputations.) Some Tar Heels men’s basketball players, Ms. Willingham contends, read at a third-grade level. (A university official last year dismissed her research as “a travesty.”) As a student at Chapel Hill, Green Bay Packers star Julius Peppers failed real courses but got B’s in what were known as “paper classes,” barely supervised independent-study courses that required only a single research paper. (Mr. Peppers claims that he “earned every grade” he got at UNC.) “Cheated” reports that Rashad McCants, key to the Tar Heels’ 2005 March Madness title, “saw his GPA rise significantly—he even made the dean’s list—after a semester in which he had done no academic work.”

Like many large universities, Chapel Hill has a committee that grants admission waivers to top sports recruits. “Cheated” says that the committee admitted players who scored below 400 on the verbal SAT—that’s the 15th percentile, barely north of illiterate—or who were chronically absent from high school except on game days. There is no chance that a student so poorly prepared for college will earn a diploma. All he can do is generate money for the university.

Most of the phony classes described in the report were in the African and Afro-American Studies Department, under Prof. Julius Nyang’oro and a departmental administrator. The department had multiple subject codes for its courses, including AFRI, AFAM and SWAH (for Swahili). This allowed transcripts to appear to satisfy Chapel Hill’s distribution requirement, even if most of an athlete’s “classes” were within the same department. Mr. Nyang’oro resigned in 2012 and was eventually indicted for fraud, accused of accepting pay for “teaching” that was imaginary. Charges were dropped when he agreed to assist investigators.

“Cheated” details how Mr. Nyang’oro liked to hang around with athletes: He was even invited to serve as a “guest coach” for the football team. Tutors and academic-support staffers also enjoyed friendly access to the jocks. At football-factory and basketball-power programs, teachers and tutors who avert their eyes from grade fixing may be rewarded with courtside seats and sideline passes.

The authors and the report agree that Mr. Nyang’oro and the administrator perceived that their role was partly to make academic problems go away so that stars could tape their ankles. University of North Carolina officials did not want to know how athletes who had barely bested chance on their SATs were suddenly pulling A’s at a selective college. “Cheated” recounts two instances when staffers told superiors that football or men’s basketball stars handed in plagiarized work. The university took swift, decisive action, the authors write: It punished those who made the reports.

Last year, according to Education Department data, UNC–Chapel Hill cleared $30 million in profit on football and men’s basketball, a number that does not include whatever part of the $297 million in gifts and grants received by the school last year was prompted by athletics, or $130 million in assets held by the athletic foundation affiliated with the college. Some of the gain is expended on sports that lose money, but football and men’s basketball are still profit centers. At a prestige university, the African-American studies department became a mechanism to exploit African-Americans. Players may as well have been picking cotton.

Across the big-college landscape, around $3 billion annually flows from networks to schools in rights fees for national TV broadcasts of football and men’s basketball. Ticket sales and local marketing add to the total. Meanwhile, the NCAA almost never sanctions colleges that don’t educate scholarship athletes.

Coaches and administrators make out well themselves even if their players don’t get educations. Tar Heels men’s basketball coach Roy Williams and football coach Larry Fedora each earn $1.8 million per year, according to the USA Today NCAA salary database. Speaking and endorsement fees for coaches rise with victory totals. Athletic director Lawrence Cunningham draws $565,000 annually, plus bonuses for wins.

Perhaps the reader is thinking: Why this worry about diplomas? Don’t big-college athletes go on to wealth in the pros? Surely starry-eyed teens with Greek-god physiques arriving at the University of North Carolina, or at any powerhouse program, believe they’re headed for professional glory in prime time.

Yet most scholarship players never receive a pro paycheck. “Cheated” reports that the Chapel Hill swindle went into full swing in 2003, when the school was trying to rebuild its basketball reputation. Since that year, 54 Tar Heels have been drafted by the NFL or NBA. That’s less than a fifth of University of North Carolina football and men’s basketball scholarship holders during the period. And Chapel Hill does better than most: Broadly across NCAA football and men’s basketball, only about 2% of athletic-scholarship recipients are drafted. Because a bachelor’s degree adds about $1 million to lifetime earnings, the diploma is the potential economic reward for the overwhelming majority of college athletes.

Of course, athletes have only themselves to blame for not taking their studies seriously. But many are encouraged by coaches to believe pipe dreams about the pros, to focus all their effort on winning so the coach gets his victory bonus. By the time NCAA athletes realize they’ve been duped, their scholarships are exhausted. Used up and thrown away, they are easily replaced by the next batch of starry-eyed teens who believe their names will be called on draft day.

After the Chapel Hill scandal went public, the school commissioned a flurry of reports, the two most prominent of which appeared to tell all but were at heart whitewashes. The first, overseen by former North Carolina Gov. Jim Martin, in 2012 declared “with confidence” that the Tar Heels athletic department knew nothing, nothing: “This was not an athletic scandal,” the report stated. “Sadly, it was clearly an academic scandal; but an isolated one.” Mr. Smith and Ms. Willingham write that in “an amazing display of evasiveness and dishonesty,” Chapel Hill chancellor Holden Thorp pretended that the Martin report concluded the matter. Later Mr. Thorp resigned and floated away to the provost’s post at Washington University in St. Louis. The best-case analysis of Mr. Thorp is that he was hopelessly incompetent; explanations go downhill from there. Yet he paid little professional price. If an NCAA athlete commits a petty violation, he can be thrown out of school. University leaders know that if their schools are caught systematically cheating, a wrist slap will be their fate.

The second report, conducted by a law firm and released in 2014, revealed that the first report was a fairy tale. Though Mr. Thorp denied knowing about the “paper classes,” it concluded that he knew Mr. Nyang’oro’s department “issued higher grades than most other departments and was popular among student-athletes.” Why wasn’t this a red flag? But this document, too, largely exonerated those who commissioned it. Thousands of students got A’s in fake classes. Yet “the higher levels of the university” were guilty only of “a loose, decentralized approach to management” that prevented “meaningful oversight,” even though the existence of “easy-grading classes with little rigor” was widely known.

The second report attached no blame to basketball coach Williams, the most marketable figure in Chapel Hill athletics, reporting his insistence that he “constantly preaches that [the] number one responsibility [of] coaches and counselors is to make sure their players get a good education.” The men’s basketball program has seven coaches for a roster that averages 16—the kind of instructor-to-student ratio normally found only in doctoral programs. Yet we’re asked to believe there’s no way the coaches could have noticed that many players never seemed to need to be in class. Mr. Williams should have been fired for presiding over an institutionally corrupt program. Instead he was given a pass.

Cheating may have gone over the top at Chapel Hill, but in collegiate sports, institutional corruption is a norm. The NCAA works assiduously to change the subject from football and men’s basketball graduation rates, a straightforward measure that anyone can understand. Instead it offers Academic Progress Rate, a hocus-pocus metric seemingly designed to be incomprehensible.

Currently the overall APR of big-college sports is 976 out of 1000. That sounds as if everyone’s nearly perfect. But on this scale, perfection is achieved if all players have at least a 2.0 GPA. Since the average GPA at public universities is 3.0, what the NCAA touts as “academic progress” may equate to significantly below-average outcomes in the classroom.

But the APR shifts the spotlight from actual grades. Last fall, Louisville announced to fanfare that football coach Bobby Petrino will receive a $500,000 bonus for his players’ academic performance. Sound enlightened? The bonus is triggered by the team hitting a 935 APR. Since the average for NCAA football programs is 951, academic excellence at Louisville is now defined down to below average.

Cynicism regarding athletics and education pervades the big-college system. The networks that are “broadcast partners” (their term) with the NCAA—ABC, CBS, ESPN, Fox, NBC and Turner—have a financial stake in college sports income and so steer clear of issues like grades and graduation rates.

Nobody much seems to care so long as money flows. Steven Spielberg is a member of the board of trustees at USC, where the graduation rate for African-American men’s basketball players is 25% and 38% for African-American football players. The reason these numbers are terrible isn’t that athletes are departing early for the pros—in the past decade, more than two-thirds of USC football and men’s basketball players were not drafted. The numbers are terrible because players are used for revenue without receiving educations. Mr. Spielberg has made two powerful movies depicting the historical exploitation of African-Americans, “The Color Purple” and “Amistad.” Where is his movie about present-day exploitation of African-Americans in college athletics? He need only look out the window at USC. Or he could buy the rights to “Cheated.”

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on the UNC scandal and the many, many other athletics cheating scandals at major universities in the USA ---
http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/25/us/unc-academic-fraud/
We're led to believe that they nearly all cheated at one time or another. The UNC scandal was unique in that it entailed fake courses and grade changes for nearly two decades and covered multiple sports and even students who were not into athletics. The sad thing is that many of the principle coaches and faculty who cheated moved on from UNC before the scandal broke and are still thriving unpunished in their careers.

Most of the students now suing UNC were not innocent victims and were knowingly cheaters. They are victims in a larger sense that they were promised an education (such as learning how to read) that was denied them in their years at UNC.

Bob Jensen's threads on cheating ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm

Admitting Politically-Connected Dummies to the University of Texas Law School
Number of 'Subpar' Applicants Admitted to Texas Law School Surged After Dean Sager's Ouster ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2015/02/number-of-subpar-applicants-admitted-.html

The number of subpar applicants admitted to the University of Texas School of Law surged after President Bill Powers forced Larry Sager to resign as dean of the law school in 2011, according to numbers from a recent report on admissions favoritism by Kroll Associates. .

Continued in article

From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on February 23, 2014

SEC Commissioner Aguilar critiques agency with sharp edge ---
http://blogs.wsj.com/cfo/2015/02/20/sec-commissioner-aguilar-critiques-agency-with-sharp-edge/?mod=djemCFO_h
Luis Aguilar, the longest-serving commissioner of the Securities and Exchange Commission laid into the agency on Friday, CFO Journal’s Maxwell Murphy reports. Among his complaints to the audience at the Practising Law Institute’s SEC Speaks conference in Washington, D.C., Mr. Aguilar lamented the SEC’s slow progress on implementing Dodd-Frank reforms, and a dearth of bans on officers and directors that have committed fraud.

Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

Scientist’s radiation cover-up might have cost thousands of lives
"The fallout of the Nobel scam of 1946," by Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post, February 10, 2015 ---
http://business.financialpost.com/2012/02/10/lawrence-solomon-the-fallout-of-the-nobel-scam-of-1946/

Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on February 18, 2015

Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Corrupt_Practices_Act

Rash of civil suits complicates FCPA cases
http://blogs.wsj.com/cfo/2015/02/17/rash-of-civil-suits-complicates-fcpa-cases/?mod=djemCFO_h
Companies that disclose their entanglement in foreign corruption cases are increasingly exposing themselves to problems far beyond the need to settle with government regulators. Now, more and more, they also have to contend with being sued by their own investors – who say they have been harmed by their company’s alleged misconduct overseas. These lawsuits may have questionable success rates, but they are influencing the timing and degree of disclosure of possible misconduct by corporate counsels to the U.S. Justice Department. The suits are often filed soon after news breaks that a company is conducting an internal investigation into allegations that its employees bribed foreign officials, even when few facts have been established.

Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

"Shelly Silver’s Asbestos Gold A case study in the links between politicians and the plaintiffs bar," The Wall Street Journal, February 1, 2015 ---
http://www.wsj.com/articles/shelly-silvers-asbestos-gold-1422832863?tesla=y

The recent corruption charges against New York Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver reveal the rot that has long plagued Albany. But the story deserves more national attention for exposing the links between politicians and the asbestos-plaintiffs bar.

The 70-year-old Mr. Silver, among the state’s most powerful Democrats, stands accused of five counts of extortion, fraud and conspiracy. But the core of U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara’s 35-page complaint is the allegation that Mr. Silver engaged in an asbestos kickback scheme for more than decade. He allegedly used his Albany power to steer taxpayer money to an asbestos doctor, who in return gave him the names of patients for high-dollar asbestos lawsuits.

As some courts have grown more skeptical about asbestos claims that are often bogus, the trial bar has focused on mesothelioma cases. Mesothelioma is a cancer linked to asbestos and has long been considered a legitimate tort claim. The Silver complaint is a case study in how lawyers, doctors and politicians conspire to recruit mesothelioma victims and pump up court payouts.

Prosecutors say Mr. Silver recruited plaintiffs through Robert Taub, who until recently led a research center for mesothelioma at Columbia University. Mr. Silver used his discretionary power over state funds to direct $500,000 in grants to Dr. Taub’s center. He also sent $25,000 to a nonprofit associated with Dr. Taub’s wife, sponsored a state Assembly resolution honoring the doctor, and helped get the doctor’s son a job, according to the complaint.

In return, the complaint says, Dr. Taub gave Mr. Silver names of mesothelioma patients who could be plaintiffs in asbestos lawsuits. Mr. Silver passed the names to Weitz & Luxenberg, a powerhouse asbestos firm where Mr. Silver worked as a lawyer and was paid a salary of $120,000. Weitz & Luxenberg also paid Mr. Silver a fee for mesothelioma patient referrals, totaling $3.2 million.

Mr. Silver has resigned as Speaker but says he will be “vindicated.” Dr. Taub is serving as a witness in the government’s case against Mr. Silver and hasn’t been charged, though he resigned from the Columbia center after the Silver complaint became public. Weitz & Luxenberg says it is “shocked” by the charges against Mr. Silver, who has taken a leave of absence from the firm. Prosecutor Bharara says the firm was unaware that Mr. Silver directed state money to Dr. Taub in return for referrals.

But it’s important to recognize that a contributions-for-patients arrangement isn’t rare. The complaint against Mr. Silver refers to “law firms” that have contributed to mesothelioma researchers. The complaint also refers to “the Other Asbestos Firm” whose affiliated foundation donated to Dr. Taub’s center and also received the names of potential plaintiffs. News reports have identified that other firm as the Simmons Law Firm of Illinois and the donation amount as $3.2 million. The Simmons firm has not been charged and the New York Times reports the firm said in a statement that it is proud to fund research at Columbia.

Though it is not part of the criminal case, Mr. Silver also used his political influence to promote judges who look favorably on asbestos claims. Mr. Silver appointed Arthur Luxenberg, a founder of Weitz & Luxenberg, to a state judicial screening committee that vets candidates for appointed judicial posts.

One state judge who has advanced during Mr. Silver’s tenure is Sherry Klein Heitler, now chief judge of New York City Asbestos Litigation (NYCAL). More than half the cases in the NYCAL docket are Weitz & Luxenberg’s. In the past four years the firm won $273.5 million of the $313.5 million (87% of the total) awarded in 15 mesothelioma verdicts—$190 million in 2014.

The American Tort Reform Association’s most recent report on “judicial hellholes” notes that this windfall was aided by Judge Heitler’s ruling last year, made at the request of Weitz & Luxenberg, to reverse a 20-year policy deferring punitive damages in asbestos cases. Judge Heitler’s predecessor had explained in a legal paper that punitive damages for wrongs committed 30 years ago serve no corrective purpose, and money could be better used to compensate genuine victims.

Judge Heitler’s ruling opened the cases to fatter verdicts and settlements that allow bigger paydays for plaintiffs firms. Judge Heitler has said that only the legislature can “deny plaintiffs the opportunity to seek punitive damages.”

NYCAL judges have also allowed the consolidation of cases, which stacks the deck against defendants who feel compelled to settle rather than risk a jackpot verdict. The consultants at Bates White report that the average NYCAL asbestos award is now $16 million—two to three times the average in courts nationwide. Sixty percent of Weitz & Luxenberg’s revenue comes from asbestos cases, much of it from mesothelioma patients.

Media commentary about the Silver case is playing as a familiar morality play about money in politics. But the real problem is a New York state government that protects incumbents with gerrymandered seats and provides enormous and largely unchecked power to bestow political favors. The link between politicians and the asbestos bar is one example that is ripe for further investigation. The Silver case isn’t an aberration.

Bob Jensen's fraud updates ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

That Guy With an Accent Who Says You're Going to Jail

"2015’s dirty dozen tax scams," by Sally P. Schreiber, Journal of Accountancy, February 6, 2015 ---
http://www.journalofaccountancy.com/news/2015/feb/dirty-dozen-tax-scams-201511766.html

Phone scams, phishing, and identity theft topped this year’s IRS list of the “dirty dozen” tax scams, which the IRS has been releasing, one scam at a time, since Jan. 22. The one-scam-a-day approach allowed the IRS to explore each one in more detail. Here is the complete list: 
 

1. Phone scams.
2. Phishing.
3. Identity theft.
4. Return preparer fraud.
5. Hiding income offshore.
6. Inflated refund claims.
7. Fake charities.
8. Filing false documents to hide income.
9. Participating in abusive tax shelters.
10. Falsifying income to claim tax credits.
11. Excessive claims for fuel tax credits.
12. Frivolous tax arguments.

According to the IRS, the most serious scams this year are phone scams, in which criminals call intended victims impersonating the IRS. Many times, the callers disguise the number they are calling to look like an IRS number and may threaten the target of the scam with arrest, deportation, or license revocation.

 

Continued in article

Identity Theft --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_theft

Jensen Comment
An enormous and ever-lasting problem is Identity Theft. In some ways stealing your Social Security number is worse than stealing a credit card number. Changing you're credit card number instantly is one a 1-800 phone call away. I don't know, but do you have to die to change your Social Security number?

The bad guys are buying Social Security numbers and names by the tens of millions. They file for phony tax refunds in your name with a phony address and steal over $100 billion from the IRS. And if they get caught the punishment is usually no deterrent from doing it again next tax season. Many of them are untouchable in other countries. Electronic tax filing (E-filing) exacerbates the problem because some attachments required by postal filing are not required for E-filing such as W-2 Forms that hinder, somewhat, claiming withholding refunds and earned-income tax credits.

People filing fake tax returns often aren't the hackers who stole the identity information. The ID thieves put the identity on the black market, usually on foreign soil, where the bad men and women buy this information on the Internet. 

Tax refund ID theft is growing 'epidemic': U.S. IRS watchdog ---
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/11/07/us-usa-tax-refund-idUKBRE9A61HB20131107

(Reuters) - More Americans' identities were stolen in tax refund crimes in the first six months of 2013 than in all of 2012, said a U.S. Internal Revenue Service watchdog on Thursday who described the problem as "a growing epidemic."

Tax refund fraud has exploded in recent years. Scammers typically use stolen names and Social Security numbers to file phony electronic tax forms for IRS refunds.

About 1.6 million Americans were victims of ID theft/tax refund crimes this year through June, up from 1.2 million taxpayers in all of 2012, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) said in a report.

"Identity theft is a growing epidemic," said J. Russell George, TIGTA's chief.

Democratic Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, a hot spot for these crimes, said in a statement that TIGTA's analysis shows the IRS is making progress, but much remains to be done.

TIGTA said that while the number of frauds has risen, the amount of federal revenue lost to these crimes has decreased. In 2011, the government lost $3.6 billion in potentially fraudulent tax refunds, down from $5.2 billion in 2010.

The thieves are increasingly working from abroad, TIGTA found. In 2011, someone using a single mailing address in Lithuania made more tax filings with fraudulent Social Security numbers than any single U.S. address, TIGTA said.

The Lithuanian address received $220,489 in fraudulent IRS refunds; an address in Shanghai received $156,533.

"The constantly evolving tactics used by scammers to commit identity theft continues to be one of the biggest challenges facing the IRS," the IRS said in a statement on Thursday.

TIGTA said the IRS must do more to spot red flags signaling potential fraud in tax filings, such as multiple filings from the same address, and to help victims more quickly.

The IRS said it agreed with TIGTA's recommendations.

Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

"6 Football Players at South Dakota Implicated in Fraud," Inside Higher Ed, January 12, 2015 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/01/12/6-football-players-south-dakota-implicated-fraud 

Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) reached a proposed settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over an accounting probe, agreeing to pay a penalty of $190 million and adjust its financial statements for three fiscal years ---
by Alex Barinka, Bloomberg News, December 29, 2014 ---
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-12-29/csc-to-pay-190-million-to-settle-sec-accounting-probe.html

Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on January 7, 2015

Companies paid record sums to settle bribery probes in 2014
http://blogs.wsj.com/cfo/2015/01/06/companies-paid-record-sums-to-settle-bribery-probes-in-2014/?mod=djemCFO_h
Companies paid more than ever before to settle Foreign Corrupt Practices Act investigations last year, the latest sign that bribery enforcement remains hot after all these years. Firms shelled out an average $157 million to settle FCPA investigations in 2014, nearly doubling the prior year’s average $80 million.

Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

Authors Who Lie and Cheat (mainly for money but sometimes for political or religious causes)
"A North Korean Gulag Survivor Admits He Lied In His Best-Selling Book," by Jack Kim and Sohee Kim, Reuters via Business Insider, January 18, 2015 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/a-north-korean-gulag-survivor-admits-he-lied-in-his-best-selling-book-2015-1

"‘Boy Who Came Back From Heaven’ actually didn’t; books recalled," by Ron Charles, The Washington Post, January 16, 2015 ---
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/style-blog/wp/2015/01/15/boy-who-came-back-from-heaven-going-back-to-publisher/?hpid=z5

Tyndale House, a major Christian publisher, has announced that it will stop selling “The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven,” by Alex Malarkey and his father, Kevin Malarkey.

The best-selling book, first published in 2010, purports to describe what Alex experienced while he lay in a coma after a car accident when he was 6 years old. The coma lasted two months, and his injuries left him paralyzed, but the subsequent spiritual memoir – with its assuring description of “miracles, angels, and life beyond This World” – became part of a popular genre of “heavenly tourism.”

Earlier this week, Alex recanted his testimony about the afterlife. In an open letter to Christian bookstores posted on the Pulpit and Pen Web site, Alex states flatly: “I did not die. I did not go to Heaven.”

Referring to the injuries that continue to make it difficult for him to express himself, Alex writes, “Please forgive the brevity, but because of my limitations I have to keep this short. … I said I went to heaven because I thought it would get me attention. When I made the claims that I did, I had never read the Bible. People have profited from lies, and continue to. They should read the Bible, which is enough. The Bible is the only source of truth. Anything written by man cannot be infallible.”

Thursday evening, Todd Starowitz, public relations director of Tyndale House, told The Washington Post: “Tyndale has decided to take the book and related ancillary products out of print.”

On Friday, Tyndale released this statement: “We are saddened to learn that Alex Malarkey, co-author of ‘The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven,’ is now saying that he made up the story of dying and going to heaven. Given this information, we are taking the book out of print.”

But there is considerable disagreement about when Alex first recanted his testimony and objected to the book, which has reportedly sold more than 1 million copies.

Last April, Alex’s mother, Beth Malarkey, posted a statement on her own blog decrying the memoir and its promotion: “It is both puzzling and painful to watch the book ‘The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven’ not only continue to sell, but to continue, for the most part, to not be questioned.” She goes on to say that the book is not “Biblically sound” and that her son’s objections to it were ignored and repressed. She also notes that Alex “has not received monies from the book nor have a majority of his needs been funded by it.”

Continued in article

"The Retraction War:  Scientists seek demigod status, journals want blockbuster results, and retractions are on the rise: is science broken?" by Jill Neimark, Aeon, 2014 ---
http://aeon.co/magazine/philosophy/are-retraction-wars-a-sign-that-science-is-broken/
We assuredly need tests for new knowledge versus new fictions.

"'The Atlantic' Revises Article on CUNY," Inside Higher Ed,  January 16, 2015 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/01/16/atlantic-revises-article-cuny

Bob Jensen's threads on cheating ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm