The ones that have been caught are the tip of the iceberg. The rest have not yet been exposed. Some may never be exposed; they may get away with their tricks.

I will NOT mention names of those I have have had to do with, but here are some typical examples of executive behavior that I have personally witnessed or know about from personally reliable sources.

1. Do not pay vendors. Make them sue you, every time. Bankrupt them and they will go away. (A businessman whom I know personally. For some reason, I refused to work for him when he asked me to.)

2. Start a major project several months, or even years, after it must be completed. (A place I worked.)

3. Spend $130K per year to service a client who is paying only $6K per year. (A place I worked.)

4. Give employees who quit, along with vendors, bad checks. (This guy went up the river for a few.)

5. Pay $250K per year in fines to the state on BWC claim errors instead of spending $99 (dollars, not K) to buy a piece of software that will permit your staff to eliminate the errors. (A place I worked.)

6. Have a huge warehouse filled with parts in no particular order. The chaos is so great the the workers refuse to even go into the warehouse, and instead order parts as they need them from vendors. Nonetheless, even though NOBODY uses the parts in the warehouse, buy several hundred thousand dollars of additional parts each year and put them into the warehouse. (My wife's former employer.)

7. A company made windows for commercial buildings. It had a huge warehouse, with some $50 million in inventory. They finally called in a consultant (my father) to solve their inventory problem. My father brought in advanced technology in the form of a clipboard, a pad of paper, a pencil, and a tape measure. He discovered that the factory had some 10,000 part numbers, yet made fewer than 100 distinct window types. Each time an order came in, a NEW part number was created and a bin assigned. The order was filled and spares were also made for the bin, as future replacements. Solution. Measure the contents of each bin and renumber parts down to less than 100, and build bins for them in the main factory. Sell off all of the contents of the warehouse. Then sell the warehouse building itself. Last, but not least, fire the brain-dead inventory manager.

8. Another case from my father's work. The board of directors of a company hired my father to find out why the company was losing money. He found that the physical business itself was sound. He also found out that the executives (sons in law of the founder & president) were stealing the company blind. The first sentence of my father's report read "The president of the company, Joe Blow, is an incompetent and should be fired." He was.

Only the guy in #4 above did any time in the slammer. The guy in #1 above is raking in money right an left, as he continues on his long career of cheating people.