American Tower has one again become a target of regulators.

The telecom company said in a regulatory filing it has received a subpoena from the Securities and Exchange Commission requesting certain documents from 2007 through the present, including in particular documents related to the Company's tax accounting and reporting.

The former chief financial officer and an accountant with Capitol Investments USA pleaded guilty to a count of securities fraud for their role in the operation of an $880 million Ponzi scheme linked to a fictitious wholesale grocery distribution business.

Roberto Torres, the CFO of Capitol, and Alejandro Torres, an accountant at Capitol, used the company to assist founder Nevin K. Shapiro in fraudulently obtaining $880 million between January 2005 and November 2009, according to US Attorney Paul J. Fishman.

They face up to 20 years in prison and a $5 million fine.

Federal regulators have charged the former treasurer of a private mortgage lending company for her role in a more than $1.9 billion fraud scheme and an attempt to scam the Treasury's Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).

Desiree Brown, the former treasurer of Taylor, Bean & Whitaker (TBW), pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit bank, wire and securities fraud, which contributed to the failures of Colonial Bank and TBW, according to US Attorney Neil H. MacBride for the Eastern District of Virginia.

The Morgan Stanley case may not go as far as the one involving Goldman. And it is way too early to know what exactly prosecutors would charge the firm with doing.

But it's possible to venture a guess based on Yves Smith's observations today at Naked Capitalism.

Remember David Stockman? President Reagan's one-time Director of the Office of Management and Budget?

Still don't? He's the one who espoused the virtues of supply-side economics and the trick down theory.

Wednesday was not a good one for the CFO profession.

Two separate trials have gotten underway this week involving chief financial officers. One of them is civil while the other is criminal.

This has not been a good week for the reputation of law-abiding CFOs.

Believe it or not, over just a four-day period, one CFO was sentenced to prison, another one pled guilty to embezzlement and a third was charged with stealing money from her firm.

Oops.

That was basically the explanation given by the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York when a lawyer for one of the defendants in the criminal insider-trading case against Galleon Group's founder, Raj Rajaratnam said federal prosecutors sent the Securities and Exchange Commission confidential wiretap information.

For its part, officials at the SEC said they did not listen to anything contained on the 10 CDs containing the recordings, and that they returned them to the US attorney.

The financial crisis was in part caused by all those people who lavishly spent money they did not have while others on Wall Street risked other people's money.

And then there was the case of Sujata Sachdeva, who also spent money she did not have but, rather, used other people's money. In her case, the practice could land her in the slammer for as much as 120 years.

Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway skate away again.

 A reinsurance subsidiary of Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway has agreed to pay $92.2 million to a number of governmental agencies and investors for its role in a scheme to manipulate the financial results of two other insurance companies in a non-prosecution agreement.