How do you stop corporate fraud?

CORPORATE SCANDALS occur with depressing regularity, from the accounting misstatements at Enron in 2001 to fake bank accounts at Wells Fargo, uncovered in 2016. In June Wirecard, a German payments processor, revealed that €1.9bn ($2.3bn) was missing from its accounts. What was remarkable about the affair was that the company’s book-keeping had been the subject of sceptical articles in the Financial Times. Yet the initial reaction of BaFin, the German regulator, was to launch an investigation into the newspaper, not the firm.