Bernard Madoff

Ethics Journal

Bernard Madoff

Bernard Lawrence Madoff founded the Wall Street firm “Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC. He also served as a non-executive chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange. Madoff was viewed as a well respected and a finance genius to those in the prominent community. For seventeen years his investor and family did not know he was running a Ponzi scheme. This man constructed the larges investment scheme in U.S. history. He stole $65 billions of dollars from banks and several investors, which caused several of his clients to go bankrupt. In 1999, when financial analyst Harry Markopolos informed the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that he believed it was legally and mathematically impossible to achieve the gains Madoff claimed to deliver. Others contended it was inconceivable that the growing volume of Madoff accounts could be competently and legitimately serviced by his documented accounting/auditing firm, a three-person firm with only one active accountant. Since Madoff's arrest, the SEC has been criticized for its lack of due-diligence, despite having received complaints from Markopolos and others for almost a decade. The SEC could have provided this from happening by auditing Madoff’s accounts regularly, and then these clients would not have lost their whole life-saving or even their retirement. Madoff business ethics was gone seventeen years ago, but at least his sons had enough courage to report their father to the federal authorities. The sentencing that he received (150 years) was more than fair, because some of these clients will not receive all of their money back.