Four former loss-prevention employees from the CVS chain in New York filed a class-action lawsuit on June 3rd against the drugstore chain, accusing their bosses of ordering them to target black and Hispanic shoppers. According to the detectives, they were fired after complaining about racial discrimination, against both customers and themselves. Questions: 1. Why is… Read more »
Posts Tagged: Internal Controls
The More Things Change, The More They Stay the Same
Walmart’s board elected a new chairman at its annual stockholders’ meeting last week. As only the third chairman in the retail giant’s history, the post was passed on to a member of the founding Walton family. Questions: 1. What type of background does Mr. Penner have that will be beneficial in this post? 2. Why… Read more »
Team Disney – Its a Small World After All
Nothing could be worse than losing your job, except maybe being required to train your replacement. That is what happened in the Magical Kingdom when cheaper H-1B workers from an India outsourcing firm replaced about 250 U.S. employees at the end of January this year. Questions: 1. What explanation did Disney executives give for this… Read more »
Spies Everywhere!
A U.S. District Judge ordered Yahoo Inc to face a nationwide class-action lawsuit and accused the company of illegally intercepting email content sent to Yahoo Mail subscribers from non-Yahoo Mail accounts. Subsequently, Yahoo used the information to boost advertising revenue. Questions: 1. Which subscribers and non-subscribers does this class-action allow to file suit? 2. What… Read more »
When Will They Ever Learn?
Bank of America (BoA) is in the news again. This time, Bank of America must pay a $30 million fine after a financial regulator found numerous violations related to the accounts of 73,000 military service members. Questions: 1. What actions did the bank take against military service members that were illegal? 2. What steps did… Read more »
ATM Dogs: The Future or Just Plain Weird?
Soomi Park, a futuristic artist and designer currently exhibiting at Biennale Internationale Design in France, has been intrigued with the issue of privacy, security, and mass-collection of personal data by governments and corporations. In response to the changes, her exhibit, The Republic of Privacy, focuses on an imagined utopia where citizens are guaranteed total privacy…. Read more »
An Expensive Glitch
On April 24, a computer outage hit 7,000 U.S. Starbuck’s company-owned stores and 1,000 Canadian company-owned Starbuck’s locations. The outage was resolved Friday night after several hours. Questions: 1. Did all locations deal with the problem in the same way? What did they do? 2. Why do you think that the outage did not affect… Read more »
How Do you Assess Likelihood about the Unknown: Insurers and Driver-less Cars
Tesla Motors is going to roll out a self-driving feature on selected cars this summer. The dilemma for insurance companies is “how do you assess the risk without an existing track record?” Questions: 1. Even when self-driving cars are widely available, what will delay their widespread adoption? 2. Why do you think that California is… Read more »
The World of Drones
At a farm in Dublin, Ireland, Paul Brennan took a video that has gone viral for its creativity in using drones – rounding up sheep. Questions: 1. Put on your thinking cap. Is there any task that a drone could do in the future to assist the accountant or auditor? 2. Besides Amazon, what other… Read more »
No longer Big Brother watching – Now its Big Teacher!
At Rutgers University, online student must download Proctortrack, a new anti-cheating technology, prior to taking exams. Questions: 1. Did you agree or disagree that the software was intrusive? Discuss the pros and cons of it. 2. Do you agree or disagree that human behavior in test taking can be reduced to an algorithm? Discuss. 3…. Read more »