It is entirely possible that Earl was right, that there is such a thing as karma. If there is, it can be said to work only on its own schedule and no one else’s. But hey, six years later is better than never.

At the time of HealthSouth’s epic failing, it seemed relatively minor.  Those heady early years of the new millenium brought us the end of such giants as WorldCom and Enron, with numbers in the tens of billions lost.  HealthSouth’s paltry $1.5b in “adjusted earnings” was hardly worth mentioning. Still, that is actually a lot of money and the whole mess nearly ended the company.

The company’s CEO, Richard Scrushy, had faced prosecution under the buck-stops-here clause of Sarbanes-Oxley, which states that executives who sign off on company financial reports are personally responsible for the content of those reports.  Remember how that was going to fix corporate fraud forever? Yeah, well.  Scrushy’s case was the first test of that clause, and it failed miserably.  He was acquitted, having successfully argued the very “I didn’t know what I was signing, I just signed it” argument that SOX was supposed to render moot.

But! He was later convicted of bribing a public official (Alabama’s then-Governor Don Siegelman, whom you may recognize from the whole US Attorneys firing scandal of late), for giving the governor half a million bucks in exchange for a seat on a state board that reviews and approves the construction of hospitals in the state WHEN HE RUNS A COMPANY THAT BUILDS AND OPERATES HOSPITALS. Ahem. So anyway, seven years in the pokey, a six-figure fine, and you’d think karma was finished with him, right?

Heck naw.  A group of HealthSouth’s shareholders went and filed a civil suit against Scrushy, alleging that not only was he complicit in the fraud, he masterminded it, and I guess they made a pretty fair argument because Scrushy (still in prison) has been ordered to pay a $2.8 billion restitution.  That was billion, with a b. Karma win! Will that amount be reduced? Probably, because there is not that much money in the world anymore, but if it made him stain his pants, even for a brief moment, it was all worth it.

Fun fact: Jason Hervey, the older brother from The Wonder Years, was a vice president at HealthSouth in 2002-2003 when all this was going on. Not that he had anything to do with it, but it’s nice to imagine him walking down the hallway and punching Richard Scrushy like he was Kevin Arnold.