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But court records suggest that the Damon executives' scheme continued throughout Bain's ownership, and prosecutors credited Corning, not Romney, with cleaning up the situation. Bain, meanwhile, tripled its investment.

Yes, it stopped during Corning's ownership.

To be fair, the whole picture isn't that clear.

First, you should know that Corning doesn't have a perfectly clean record. Corning's lab subsidiaries MetPath and Metwest paid a $39.8 million dollar fine in 1993 for unnecessary blood tests. Corning paid $8.6 million in 1995 for its own lab and tests that doctors never ordered. Corning owned Quest Diagnostics, which paid $6.8 million the same year for tests doctors never ordered (yeah, *that* Quest, which Corning spun off into a private company). So Corning had some experience with fraud itself.

Damon lost money for three years after being purchased by Bain, due to payments on the debt Bain used for the LBO. But it made $18 million the next year, then Corning bought them.

And I'm almost certain Corning didn't self-report this (I need to go to my office and pull some binders from Fraud and Abuse seminars during this period - this case was covered at several seminars I attended) and clean it up. Damon was caught. That's when Corning cleaned it up.

So let's not paint Corning as completely the good guy in this.