Moody's Fined

Moody's Investors Services, the well-known bond rating agency, was fined $16.5 million for failing to ensure the accuracy of its statistical models. The SEC accused the company of failures on more than 650 mortgage backed securities. Moody's assigned ratings on several bonds that were inconsistent with ratings for similar bonds and did not establish a rigorous control process for bond data entry, resulting in incorrect data entry. This resulted in bonds being given incorrect ratings.