Every public accusation is shaped. It has some literary form, which is to say it is written in some style. Most of them, by design, convey one fairly simple idea: they preserve the particulars of their corporate wrongdoers while bringing them into conformity with a general type of wrongdoing. The red flag, for example, is a fusion of form and content so that we can discern what it means by examining not only what it says but how it says it.

Accusations are best served up through articles and aperçus. We throw a wide net over corporations using following sources: (1) LexisNexis and Dow Jones Interactive corporate data archives; (2) stories, editorials and commentary in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, San Jose Mercury News, Financial Times, and the Washington Post; (3) articles, editorials, and commentary in magazines such as Fortune, Forbes, BusinessWeek, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone; (4) Edgar Archives and regulatory filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, especially the Wells Notices of potential civil action by the SEC (a Wells Notice is issued to a target of an investigation to give the company and its executives an opportunity to provide facts or testimony to regulators to convince them that the filing of a wrongdoing complaint is unwarranted); and finally, (5) Internet sites specializing in white-collar crime filings under the False Claims Act.