Kaufman Vows to Go After Wall Street Fraud

In response to Lehman Brothers' "Repo 105" accounting gimmick to shift debt off its balance sheet, Senator Ted Kaufman (D-Del.) vows to weed out fraud on Wall Street. In a recent video interview with Yahoo! Finance Tech Ticker, Kaufman asserts: "You can't have two laws in the land."Under Kaufman's Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act, (FERA), passed in May of 2009, federal prosecutors and FBI agents have $175 million to catch people that engaged in financial fraud.

While Kaufman said that Lehman Repo 105 was "very questionable," he emphasized that more resources were available to prosecutors and the FBI to fight financial fraud. "The FBI, Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission are all working hard on a case," he said.

In the video, Kaufman conveys his belief that Lehman was the tip of the Wall Street fraud. Tech Ticker's Aaron Trask noted that other firms, such as Bank of America, were using Repo 105 maneuvers to hide assets at the end of the quarter, and "it appears that it was all legal for them to do this."

In response to Lehman Brothers' "Repo 105" accounting gimmick to shift debt off its balance sheet, Senator Ted Kaufman (D-Del.) vows to weed out fraud on Wall Street. Ivy is Editor-at-Large for Advanced Trading and Wall Street & Technology. Ivy is responsible for writing in-depth feature articles, daily blogs and news articles with a focus on automated trading in the capital markets. As an industry expert, Ivy has reported on a myriad ... View Full Bio