Promises Kept

What a tremendous shock. The well-liked principal accounting officer of Wisconsin-based Koss Corporation, Sujata “Sue” Sachdeva, was accused of embezzling more than $31 million from Koss – a publicly traded maker of stereo headphones – between 2004 and 2009. On Jan. 20, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted Sachdeva.

Koss had been receiving a “clean” opinion on its audited financial statements for years. The U.S. Sarbanes-Oxley Act didn’t help; internal control section 404(b) would have applied only if Koss was bigger. So the members of its board of directors were dumbstruck when it was told about this astronomical fraud.