On a recent visit to Salt Lake City, Alexander Dyck ordered Chinese takeout and received a branded fortune cookie wishing him wealth and promoting FTX, presumably packaged before the crypto empire’s epic collapse. “I should have saved it,” he said regretfully.To get more news about fraudulent company, you can visit wikifx.com official website.

Mr. Dyck is a professor of finance at the University of Toronto, who just published a provocative new study on the pervasiveness of corporate fraud. The study has been passed around in the world of academia in recent weeks, and has become a fascination among general counsels, corporate leaders and investors.It suggests that only about a third of frauds in public companies actually come to light, and that fraud is disturbingly common. Mr. Dyck and his co-authors estimate that about 40 percent of companies are committing accounting violations and that 10 percent are committing what is considered securities fraud, destroying 1.6 percent of equity value each year — about $830 billion in 2021.  “What people don’t get is how widespread the problem of corporate fraud is,” Dyck said about his study, which was published in the Review of Accounting Studies this month.Tip of the iceberg Last year, Trevor Milton, the founder of Nikola, the electric vehicle maker, and Elizabeth Holmes, founder of the blood testing company Theranos, were both found guilty of fraud in high profile trials. Holmes’s sentencing coincided with the swift fall of FTX, founded by Sam Bankman-Fried, all of which left 2022 with a distinctly fraudulent flavor.

But the amount of fraud perpetrated at any given time stays pretty steady, Mr. Dyck said.

Mr. Dyck and his colleagues wanted to scratch the surface of misconduct in public companies to figure out how much of it goes undiscovered normally. To do this, they first examined a period of unique scrutiny in accounting history, the 2001 demise of the auditing firm Arthur Andersen following the collapse of Enron.

At that time, the firm’s former clients were in the spotlight and new auditors were far more motivated to uncover wrongdoing, given the suspicions looming over companies that had worked with Arthur Andersen. That should make the rate of fraud they found more accurate than other measures. But the probes didn’t uncover more wrongdoing among Arthur Andersen’s clients than at other businesses reliant on other auditors. The same ratio of fraud appeared in a set of comparisons with other research, which led them to conclude it is consistent. They used this rate of fraud to conclude that about a third of corporate fraud goes unnoticed.Given how common fraud is at audited public companies, Mr. Dyck said, misconduct is likely even more pervasive in privately held businesses, particularly in crypto, which is only loosely regulated.

In the trenches Even people who have spent their careers digging into corporate wrongdoing have trouble estimating just how much fraud goes on in big business, and how little is detected.

Allison Herren Lee, a former commissioner and interim chair at the Securities and Exchange Commission, has worked as an enforcement lawyer and inside a mismanaged business. She said she’s very familiar with how people in business try to push the limits, but was surprised by the study’s estimate that a third of misconduct goes unnoticed.

In the early 2000s, Ms. Lee was a partner at a law firm in Denver where she did a stint at the telecommunications provider Qwest Communications International, on loan as an adviser to the company then helmed by Joseph Nacchio. She often found herself advising clients against the risky measures the company proposed to undertake hastily and with minimal legal review, she said. In 2007, Nacchio was convicted of securities fraud and sentenced to prison.

Still, it’s very difficult to prove misconduct and target everyone involved in wrongdoing, Ms. Lee said. People involved often feel they are just testing boundaries rather than violating the law and such schemes can be sprawling in major corporations. “To prosecute fraud you have to show intent,” she said. “In big public companies that’s tough, because it takes a village to commit fraud.