As someone who writes about business ethics, I have, of course, been following the appalling scandal of backdating stock options–rewarding overpaid CEOs and other executives by pretending the option was issued earlier, at a lower price–creating a windfall for the employee, whose stock is immediately worth more than it’s supposed to be. It has tax consequences, too.

But I’d somehow missed the part about at least one company providing backdated stock options to the estate of its deceased CEO! Paul Krugman writes about this in yesterday’s New York Times:

The moral of the story is that we still haven’t come to grips with the epidemic of corporate misgovernance revealed four years ago by the Enron and WorldCom scandals, then drowned out as a political issue by the clamor for war with Iraq. Even now, we’re still learning how deep the rot went.