off the operations of Avis's corporate-owned locations as a new company, Avis Rent a Car, Inc. HFS also bought Resort Condominiums International, a timeshare exchange service, for up to $825 million. In 1997, HFS acquired PHH Corp. for $1.8 billion. PHH's businesses of mortgage brokerage, relocation services, and fleet management were expected to synergize with HFS's real estate and car rental businesses. However, later that year, Silverman led HFS into what would prove a disastrous merger with CUC International, a direct marketing company that operated discount membership programs like Shoppers Advantage and Travelers Advantage. HFS and CUC combined in a "merger of equals" on December 18, 1997, to form Cendant Corporation. As part of the merger, Silverman announced he would reduce his day-to-day involvement with the company and assume the company's chairmanship in preference of CUC's founder and CEO Walter Forbes. In January 1998, Cendant purchased Jackson Hewitt, a franchised chain of tax preparation offices, for $480 million. 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. 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