Most CPAs will never face the underbelly of an accounting malpractice lawsuit. Those who do, however, will say the challenges are something they never want to experience again in their lives.
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When you think of fraud within an organization, a newer employee may be top-of-mind, but according to the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE), seven percent of perpetrators committed fraud during their first year and more than 53 percent had been with their organization for more than five years.
There’s no way around it—according to the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, an estimated five percent of annual revenues are lost to financial crime. What do these numbers mean for you? Big or small, public or private – with statistics like these, there’s a good chance your business is more likely than not to fall victim to internal fraud.
We all recognize budget is a constant concern for auditors and investigators. Oftentimes our technology budgets are just too tight. We find ourselves looking for powerful tools to add to our toolbox that do not break the bank. One of these tools is Active Data for Excel.
Reflecting back on the performance of more than 1,000 business valuations over the last 20-plus years, I have observed the regular occurrence of an economic event in many divorce-related engagements that I have named the Pre-divorce Business Downturn Syndrome (“PBDS” for short).
As a frequent speaker on the subject of fraud, people often ask me, “How do you investigate fraud?” My answer is always the same: You look for the anomaly. To me, it sounds so simple until I step back and realize that most people cannot see the anomaly, although it is usually right in front of them.
Identifying fraud symptoms in financial statements requires observation and recognition. If you don’t look, you’re unlikely to find it. Worse yet, if you do look, are you sure you will recognize the symptoms of fraud?
Fraud, unlike acts of terror, murder, or bank robbery, is rarely observed. Instead, only symptoms or indicators, most often exhibited through changes in the financial statements, are present.
With all of the publicity that surrounded the Bernard Madoff, Scott Rothstein, ZeekRewards and Allen Stanford Ponzi schemes, among many others, you would think that people would have by now received the message about Ponzi Schemes; how they work and how those investors lose their money.
Crowdfunding is the relatively new process of using social media to receive small contributions from many different individual investors.
Rooting through and indexing large amounts of documents can be a complex and time-consuming task, placing undue burdens on investigators and clogging a case’s workload. This sort of complication can have negative effects on the timeline and ...
I was recently surprised to learn at a team meeting that my peers were not as familiar with the many Excel shortcuts that I apparently take for granted. Urged by our team to share more, I decided I should share a few of the more frequently used Excel shortcuts with you: