It maybe altruistic to expect all graduates to adhere or even respect moralistic philosophy when the issues of pay and perks come into play.
Yet it this very neglect of ethics by all concerned from Main Street to Wall Street that has continued to allow negligent irresponsible acts to recur resulting in the loss in values of many investors’ funds.
To allow executives strong leverage in dictating salaries and perks based on credentials is one thing; providing opportunities for self gain without proper checks and balances to the detriment of stakeholders is simply careless and deserving.
The rate at which blue chip companies had been failing for the last fifteeen years under the management of greedy and negligent stewards surely must be embarrassing to the discerning alma maters.
The time is nigh for renowned academic institutions from where Wall Street frequently head hunts to self examine their programmes on inculcation of moral values and leadeship principles be the source Socrates or Sun Tzu.
Having rules to revoke qualifications and licences thus removing opportunities for deviant executives to repeat careless and negligent performances in new companies are insufficient today. Boards of universities should provide means to enhance and maintain long term faculty contact with former graduates in Wall Street as a way to monitor conduct.
The recurrent cycles of management failures must at least point to some oversight on the part of prestigious universities which frequently pride themselves on their graduates’ successful employments in equally renowned financial institutions.
Board of universities must realise that dispensing qualifications comes with a degree of responsibility and realisation that universities too owe an indirect duty of care to the public because any qualification conferred is a pass on which employers allow entry into companies’ realms and ultimately access to stakeholders’ funds.
It should be a norm for universities to adequately inform the public of actions taken on former graduates should their graduates’ proven guilty of irresponsible, greedy, negligent incompetences and fraudulent activities in the markets. This should only act to further strengthen the credibility of the university concerned in addition to being a reflection of the university fulfilling its social responsibility.
Making executives aware of the possibility of being named and shamed provides an excellent safeguard against temptations to enrich themselves unethically. Surely, stakeholders should always have a right to know from which tree the rotten apples came from?

http://blogs.businessweek.com/debateroom/archives/2008/11/us_financial_cr.html

http://crimesandpunishment.blogspot.com/

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98435438

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12636345&mode=comment&intent=readBottom

The auditor does not need to be sure on any entity’s survivability because if the reader forgets, the auditor is ultimately not responsible for the company as a going concern which is the management’s. This concept is among a few other protectionist clauses available to auditors for the last fifty years or more.
The opinion of the auditor is reached on the basis of reasonable expectations that the management has conducted its financial transactions in a true and fair manner. In effect, the auditor assures nothing as far as the viability of the firm but support to an extent the credibility of the accounts concerned.
The crucial question bearing on us in the midst of repeated failures of entities for the last fifteen years from the dotcom bubble to this subprime crisis, is where should the role of auditors extend?
If the role merely ends upon giving an unqualified opinion if the firm ‘appeared’ to have fulfilled stringent audit criteria for that opinion including no awareness of any significant uncertainty; with no further onus on the auditors, what is the economic significance of the auditors in today’s changed market demographics and economic challenges?
Sure, many know that the auditors cannot act as ‘watchdog’ but obtain reasonable assurance that the financial statements have been prepared in accordance with strict accounting standards. Yet, it is precisely these statements that are relied upon by nvestors and other stakeholders.
And ironically, the colossal volumes of accounting and audit standards promulgated and exported by the US and UK institutions have not been adequately followed to protect the firms from misguided management of assets.
These institutions’ success appears to be in fostering highly demanded accounting education for export. A great majority of audit apprentices will be able to recite audit standards in toto based on their solid academic and practical training. But ask any auditor to stake paychecks and reputations on the line to assure the viability of firms as going concerns for even short term, the response will be most certainly condescendingly disapproving.
The damaged economic landscapes hurting the lower and middle class today demonstrate once again, that the stringent standards promulgated through a century of experience are by themselves merely legacies on paper when greed and ‘irrational exuberance’ become the orders of the day.
If the role of the auditor is not dissected and reengineered to enhance the responsibility of auditors, not only will vicious cycles continue but perhaps profession of auditors will become even more minuscule applying only to small firms; waiting to be relegated to pages of history when true automation of companies become a reality where firms submit their financial transactions direct to the exchanges to be ‘audited’.