ABSTRACT
Canada, the United States’ nearest neighbor and largest trading partner, paid close attention to the Enron and WorldCom accounting scandals. Thomas Allen, chair of Canada’s Accounting Standards Oversight Council, told a newspaper reporter in July 2002 that his organization was re-examining Canada’s accounting practices in light of the Enron and WorldCom scandals. Unlike in the United States, where the federal Securities and Exchange Commission enforces securities laws for the entire country, Australia, another country culturally and economically similar to the United States, enacted its own accounting and corporate governance reforms in 2004. Japan suffered its own series of financial scandals during the early 2000s. In October 2004, regulators discovered that Seibu Railway, the primary train operator in Tokyo, had misstated shareholder information for the last five years to conceal its violation of Tokyo Stock Exchange regulations. The European Union’s real gross domestic product shrank four percent in 2009 as America’s financial crisis swept eastward across the Atlantic.
