Corporate ethics scandals span decades of American history and are not limited to any single industry or profession.
These widely known ethical breaches have taken a variety of forms, have involved different levels of the hierarchy, and thus have required specialized responses from regulators to correct and control behavior. For example, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) of 1977 was created after a series of U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigations into hundreds of companies that had issued bribes to foreign officials to obtain government contracts. The FCPA was designed to increase transparency of the exchanges. By effect, this new regulation mandated the adoption of new accounting rules for organizations. Shortly afterwards, in the wake of more scandals involving defense contractors, the Packard Com- mission, created by President Reagan, attempted to miti- gate procurement fraud by recommending that these companies adopt ethics programs and encouraging indus- try-wide self-regulation (Kurland 1993).