Editing Cendant (section)

===Accounting scandal===
Just months after the merger, in April 1998 Cendant uncovered massive accounting improprieties at CUC which resulted in one of the largest financial scandals of the 1990s.  At the time, Vice Chairman E. Kirk Shelton was reported to have inflated the company's revenue by $500 million over a period of three years. He had reported a 1997 net income of $55.4 million when the true 1997 result was a net loss of $217.2 million. As these irregularities in the books of Cendant were discovered in early 1998, an audit committee set up by Cendant's Board of Directors launched an investigation and discovered that the former management team of CUC, including its top executives [[Walter Forbes]] and [[Kirk Shelton]], had been fraudulently preparing false business statements for several years.{{citation needed|date=August 2015}}  When this report was released to the public, the resulting damage to the market value for the company was approximately $14 billion, with their stock tumbling from a high of $41 down to nearly $12.  At the time, this fiasco was the largest case of accounting fraud in the country's history. After the accounting scandal was uncovered, Silverman and the Cendant board forced Forbes’ resignation and Silverman assumed the CEO post.

In March 2001, Forbes and Shelton were indicted by a federal grand jury and sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which accused the company of directing the massive accounting fraud that ultimately cost the company and its investors billions of dollars. Shelton served 8 of his 10-year prison sentence before being released early for exemplary behavior. Former CEO Walter Forbes was sentenced to 12 years in prison in 2007.

Under Silverman, Cendant bounced back from the accounting scandal far outperforming the markets in the early 2000s.