As a convicted felon, Sam E. Antar, the former CFO for the now-defunct consumer-electronics chain Crazy Eddie, no doubt has regrets. Among them: he is no longer in the game at a time when corporate fraud is experiencing a resurgence. "If I were out of retirement today, I'd be bigger than Bernie Madoff," he boasts. In conjunction with CEO Eddie Antar (his cousin), Sam Antar helped mastermind one of the largest corporate frauds in the 1980s, bilking investors and creditors out of hundreds of millions of dollars. Today, he makes a living lecturing about corporate fraud (and shorting the stocks of companies he thinks may have inflated earnings). Antar says that despite the antifraud provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 and the recently enacted Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, it remains as easy today for bad guys, both internal and external, to loot corporate coffers as it was during the Enron and WorldCom days. "Nothing's changed," he says. "Wall Street analysts are just as gullible, internal controls remain weak, and the SEC is underfunded and, at best, ineffective. Madoff only got caught because the economy tanked." Read the Article

A new survey of more than 300 chief audit executives by Grant Thornton found that 88 percent do not believe that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act should be repealed, though half said the shifting regulatory landscape poses the greatest threat to their company. The research also found that of those that believe SOX should be repealed, the cost of compliance is the main reason for doing so. "Since the passage of SOX, organizations have had to dedicate significant resources to comply with a host of new laws and regulations," said partner Warren Stippich, who leads Grant Thornton's national governance, risk and compliance solution practice. "Based on discussions with various CAEs during the survey process, many believe that SOX brings a continued focus by management on financial and governance-related controls. However, CAEs believe that compliance audit processes are now well-defined and are currently exploring ways to contribute value creation to the organization well beyond compliance monitoring and reporting."

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Ruth Madoff's account at Bank of New York Mellon Corp. (BK) received "fraudulent" transfers of at least $14 million, said the trustee liquidating her husband Bernard Madoff's firm, who wants to "recapture" $44.8 million.  Irving Picard, the trustee, said last week that he had asked the bank for the couple's monthly bank statements, canceled checks and other records from January 2002 through December 2008. Bank of New York had no objection to providing them, he said in the March 10 filing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan. Money going into Ruth Madoff's personal bank account came from the imprisoned fraudster's companies, which received nothing in return, Picard said in previous filings. When Bernard Madoff's Ponzi scheme collapsed in 2008, the funds became the property of his customers, Picard said in his 2009 lawsuit against Ruth Madoff.

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