posted a large loss. HealthSouth was accused by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) of an accounting scandal where the company's earnings were falsely inflated by $1.4 billion. In 1996, Scrushy allegedly instructed the company's senior officers and accountants to falsify company earnings reports in order to meet investor expectations and control the price of the company's stock. The fraud continued for seven years. In certain fiscal years, the company's income was overstated by as much as 4700%. The $1.4 billion represents more than 10% of the company's total assets. At one point, the company's corporate taxes—based on its fraudulent earnings—were higher than its actual earnings. In 1998, HealthSouth was accused of violation of the Securities Exchange Act by failing to disclose negative trends and misrepresenting company's financial information. In 2003, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission took action against HealthSouth regarding a corporate accounting scandal, in which its founder, chairman, and chief executive officer, Richard M. Scrushy, was accused of directing company employees to falsely report grossly exaggerated company earnings in order to meet stockholder expectations. In March 2003, HealthSouth's CEO Richard M. Scrushy was charged with the accounting fraud and the SEC announced it was investigating whether Scrushy's stock sell was related to HealthSouth posting a large loss. HealthSouth hired an outside law firm to review Scrushy's stock sale, with the firm concluding that the sale and profit loss were not related, although this did not take the company off the SEC's radar. On the evening of March 18, 2003 FBI agents executed search warrants at the company's headquarters after the company's chief financial officer William Owens agreed to wear a wire in a failed attempt to get Scrushy to talk about the fraud. The board of directors worked vigorously on rectifying the accounting issues, starting with the termination of CEO Scrushy in 2003 and paying $325 million in 2004 regarding allegations of the company having defrauded various federal healthcare programs. In June 2005, Scrushy was acquitted on all 36 of the accounting fraud counts against him, most notably one count in violation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. By mid-to-late 2006, HealthSouth, which avoided filing for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Protection, completed its recovery and relisted its stock on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol HLS. In 2009, Scrushy was sued for fraud by HealthSouth investors and ordered to repay his company $2.8 billion. Recovery and the