| Topic area | Fraud / Unfair Business Dealings |
| Target audience | Undergraduate and graduate level IS/CS/CE/EE majors in general. |
| Activity type | worksheet, reading assignment, class discussion. |
| Time required | Out of class time: 1-2 hours. In class time: 2 hours. |
| Attachments | Worksheet |
| Additional materials | A copy of the article ``Anatomy of a Fraud,'' by Mike Maremont, in Business Week, September 16, 1996, pages 90-94. |
| Background needed to complete the assignment | Students need to be given a copy of the article about this case study incident, or to otherwise be able to locate the article. Beyond this, no particular knowledge or skills are needed to complete the assignment. |
| References |
``Ex-Kurzweil CEO denies wrongdoing,'' by Ralph Ranalli, in The Boston Herald,
May 7, 1996. (this article is before the trial results) SEC litigation release |
| Last modified | August 1998 |
Goals for the activity:
There are three primary goals for the activity.
One is to understand basic financial terms and concepts involved in the fraud.
These do not require any special or deep background in business.
The second goal is have the students consider how they might handle being in the
position of different persons involved in the incident.
The third goal is to get students to think about how easy it might be to start on
the ``slippery slope'' of unethical behavior;
that is, to incrementally compromise their ethical position in a series of
small, seemingly-harmless steps.
Knowledge / skills / attitudes to be developed (behavioral objectives):
Students should develop
(a) some very basic knowledge of financial fraud in business, and
(b) more careful attitudes towards actions that might lead to incrementally compromising
their ethical position in a series of small, seemingly-harmless steps.
Procedure:
The reading is four pages.
This is generally too long to wait
for all students to read it carefully in class.
So the preferred approach is to
give the article and the worksheets to the students at
the end of one class and ask them to come to the next class
with the worksheet completed and prepared to discuss their responses.
The first worksheet can be collected at the beginning of the next class or not, according to whether it is desired to have a grade for this assignment.
Class discussion can proceed by first calling on some students to give the terminology definitions, and then discussing the more subjective responses. For each of the subjective questions, explicitly ask after the first response if there are any other different responses.
Alternatively, the class can be broken into small groups, with each group assigned to come up with a consensus response to one of the first five questions on the second sheet. Then each group can present their consensus conclusion and argument on a given question.
Assessing outcomes:
The simplest assessment of outcome is to grade the responses on the
first worksheet. These questions are primarily objective / factual
questions which check that the person has read and understood the article.
The questions on the second worksheet are more subjective in nature.
A variation of this is that, when the worksheet is first handed out you can ask the students to place a check mark by the terms that they believe they already know the meaning of. This should allow them, at the end of the assignment, to better see what they have learned.
The point of the last question on the second worksheet is that even apparently very moral people can become involved in large, continuing incidents of unethical behavior.
Additional remarks:
None.
Author contact information:
Kevin W. Bowyer
Computer Science & Engineering
University of South Florida
Tampa, FL 33620-5399
Fax: 813 974-5456
Email: kwb@csee.usf.edu