Fraudsters’ slick olive oil switch
Read Time: 13 mins
Written By:
Donn LeVie, Jr., CFE
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The setting: a corporate chieftain’s mahogany-paneled office.
“What do you have for me?” the CEO asks.
“A potential acquisition that could help cover our tracks on other matters,” his CFO replies and hands over a spreadsheet. “One complication: They might’ve been goodwill hunting without a license.”
“Imagine that,” the CEO says, smirking as he eyes the numbers.
“They took a possibly bogus charge after buying a competitor, but it dovetailed nicely with the commodities nosedive. Bold and smooth. Not on par with our game, of course.”
“So few are,” the CEO says. “If you think we can use them more than they might try to use us, kick legal into due dillie mode and draft a pitch for my review. I don’t want this to distract our beloved board members from their gourmet lunch next quarter. And unless I say otherwise, you and I will communicate about this entirely offline.”
“Will do. At a minimum, it should pay off as well as the Asian takeover we did two years ago. Yeah, they hosed us for $8 mil. But we wrote off 23, and no one questioned it. I love my powerboat.”
“Sweet. I want an even bigger margin on this one. Make it happen.”
“Right.”
LAYERS OF DECEPTION
The above conversation never took place. But there’s nothing imaginary about the attitudes and techniques it illustrates.
“It would be an understatement to say that fraudsters are creative and opportunistic,” says Alton Sizemore, CFE, CPA. “That’s why two-way fraud schemes are more common than some investigators realize.”
After a 25-year FBI career, Sizemore is director of investigations for Forensic Strategic Solutions, a forensic accounting firm with offices in Birmingham, Dallas and Washington, D.C.
“Should we care if one crook bilks another?” he asks. “Absolutely. The cheated one will find an innocent victim to absorb his loss.”
Fraudsters don’t worry that much about losing money when they acquire a company that might have fraudulently overstated its assets and hidden liabilities to spur a run-up in its market value, Sizemore adds. Honest acquirers would run in the opposite direction. But fraudsters see it primarily as an opportunity to commit a bigger fraud of their own, in which they write off much more than they overpaid. And their subsequent goodwill write-down offsets and helps conceal embezzlements from their company. [The American Institute of CPAs’ Statement on Standards for Valuation Services No. 1 defines goodwill as “… that intangible asset arising as a result of name, reputation, customer loyalty, location, products, and similar factors not separately identified.”]
“Even when results don’t fulfill the fraudsters’ expectations, they don’t take the hit; shareholders do,” Sizemore says. “It’s always heads, they win; tails, others lose.”
SMOKE OR FIRE?
It can, however, be hard to tell if either or both participants in a merger and acquisition (M&A) deal have misstated their financials. A current high-profile dispute exemplifies this, with each party to a massive acquisition accusing the other of false statements.
In 2011, HP bought U.K. software maker Autonomy for $10 billion. But the following year, HP stunned the markets when it wrote off most of the deal’s value, alleging in a statement that $5 billion of its charge was due to “a willful effort on behalf of certain former Autonomy employees to inflate the underlying financial metrics of the company in order to mislead investors and potential buyers.”
Autonomy’s erstwhile head fired back that HP was trying to find a scapegoat for its own incompetence. “I utterly reject all allegations of impropriety,” wrote former Autonomy CEO Dr. Michael R. Lynch in an open letter to HP’s board. “Can HP really state that no part of the $5 billion write-down was, or should be, attributed to HP’s operational and financial mismanagement of Autonomy since the acquisition?” he asked.
The U.S. Department of Justice and the U.K. Serious Fraud Office are looking into the matter. When pressed to publicly reveal specifics underlying its fraud allegations against Autonomy, HP announced it won’t do so until the dispute reaches court.
“While Dr. Lynch is eager for a debate,” HP announced in its statement, “we believe the legal process is the correct method in which to bring out the facts and take action on behalf of our shareholders. In that setting, we look forward to hearing Dr. Lynch and other former Autonomy employees answer questions under penalty of perjury.”
With so little to go on, it’s hard to say whether HP can prove Autonomy committed financial statement fraud. But HP’s deliberate pace and apparent confidence imply it just might have accomplished two tasks essential to successful litigation in this context:
FINDING THE EVIDENCE
“Financial statement fraud often involves so-called ‘topside’ journal entries that produce a desired, but not necessarily accurate or legitimate, effect on the numbers,” says Gerry Zack, CFE, CPA, CIA, founder and president of Zack, P.C., an audit, anti-fraud and risk advisory firm near Washington, D.C.
For example, Zack explains, all accounts receivable activity takes place in a subsidiary ledger — its totals feed the general ledger, which flows into the financial statements. However, as their name implies, topside journal entries aren’t made in subsidiary ledgers. That’s because fraudulent transactions in subsidiary ledgers are visible to many employees. So, when possible, fraudsters post their bogus journal entries topside.
Fraudsters also try to hide their activities from auditors. With companies routinely posting enormous numbers of transactions, auditors can examine only limited samples whose monetary value equals a set, undisclosed minimum amount. But if fraudsters somehow learn the auditor’s materiality threshold, it’s a simple matter for them to keep all their fraudulent transactions below that amount and greatly reduce the chance the auditors will ever notice their illegitimate entries.
To satisfy the markets, Zack says, the perpetrators of one of the largest frauds in U.S. history made hundreds of journal entries just below the materiality threshold their company’s auditors observed. The infamous company’s name? HealthSouth.
RATIOS TELL THE TALE
HealthSouth’s avoidance of its auditor’s materiality factor is something Forensic Strategic Solutions’ Sizemore will never forget. As the Birmingham, Ala., FBI office’s assistant special agent in charge, he managed the 2003 HealthSouth investigation. Sizemore’s account of the $2.7 billion financial statement fraud (“Sniffing for Cooked Books,” ACFE article, Aug. 2010) illustrates the detective power of financial statement ratio analysis.
Sizemore describes another financial statement fraud auditors should have detected. Just for Feet was a discount shoe retailer, headquartered in Birmingham, with outlets in 40 states. By the time the scheme ended, the per-share price of Just for Feet stock had plunged from $29 to $1.25. A competitor acquired the company after five of its top executives cooperated with investigators and were convicted of felonies.
As in the HealthSouth fraud, there were numerous conspicuous indications of potential fraud. “Noticing some of them required no more than common sense,” Sizemore says. “For example, with a $400 million inventory, Just for Feet could offer every size, make and model of all major brand shoes. But not everyone needs size 13 green tennis shoes. So those models sat on the shelf and became obsolete. When Just for Feet’s CPA firm did the annual audit, it estimated the value of obsolete inventory at $150,000 instead of at $100 million, which would have been a conservative estimate. Red flags don’t come any bigger or brighter than that, but the auditors ignored it on Just for Feet’s financial statements, and investors were duped.”
CFEs can learn much from studying the audit process and its objectives, Sizemore says. The better they understand it, the more capable they’ll be of independently obtaining and analyzing information, such as comparing their company’s financial ratios to industry standards and prior periods and business cycles.
“Approach that task with professional skepticism,” he advises. “If a ratio value doesn’t make sense to you, seek out the people responsible for it — up or down the information supply chain — until you get a clear and reasonable explanation. If someone tells you they plug in a number to make the financial statements look better, you have an issue for law enforcement.” (For more information on ratio analysis, see the ACFE’s 2013 Fraud Examiners Manual, 1.243, 1.244.)
CFEs not trained as auditors can gain greater insight into that profession by exploring the auditing standards issued and enforced by the U.S. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), a private-sector nonprofit entity, created by the U.S. Sarbanes-Oxley Act, with quasi-governmental regulatory powers and responsibilities. (See the resources list at the end of this article for a list of those standards most pertinent to material misstatements in financial reports.)
HIGHER HURDLE
Proving intent in a financial statement fraud case has never been easy. But a 2011 federal court verdict has made it even more difficult. The U.S. Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, affirmed a lower court ruling that rejected plaintiffs’ claims in Fait v. Regions Financial Corporation, et al, an investor class action complaint. The suit sought damages from a bank that had issued allegedly negligent false and misleading statements concerning goodwill and loan loss reserves related to its recent acquisition of another bank.
“The Second Circuit held that when a company’s management makes an estimate of, for example, goodwill in its financial statements, that estimate is an opinion,” says John C. Coffee Jr., Adolf A. Berle Professor of Law at Columbia Law School in New York (and 2011 recipient of the ACFE’s Cressey Award). “To hold the company liable for such an opinion, you must show not only that it was inaccurate, but also that the company did not believe it. The latter requirement is a new and higher hurdle [for prosecutors and plaintiffs] to overcome.”
A company’s communications might contain information supporting a claim that the company didn’t believe its estimate. “For example,” Coffee says, “a rating agency assigns a triple A rating to an investment product that one of its staff — in a contemporaneous email — describes as ‘not even B class.’ However, you don’t get discovery that can find such emails until you have applied with particularity sufficient facts that give rise to an inference of fraud.”
800 POUNDS AND ABSOLUTELY BANANAS
“Many CFEs want to optimize their ability to detect potential fraud and, where appropriate, establish probable cause for an investigation,” says Jonathan Marks, CFE, CPA, partner-in-charge of Crowe Horwath LLP’s fraud, ethics and anti-corruption practice. “Developing their awareness of employee personality traits and behavior is a good way to do that.”
To illustrate, he cites the case of Richard S. Fuld, Jr., former president of the now-defunct investment bank Lehman Brothers. In recognition of Fuld’s intense personality and aggressive style, associates called him “the gorilla.” A notorious 2007 bootleg video conveys a striking impression. In it, Fuld tells an audience of colleagues, business leaders and government officials how he feels about short sellers of Lehman Brothers stock. “I want to reach in, rip out their heart and eat it before they die,” he says.
“Fuld was so overbearing and arrogant that no one — including Lehman’s board — questioned his actions until it was too late,” Marks says.
Anton Valukas, the bankruptcy examiner appointed to look into the reasons for Lehman’s collapse said in his report, “There is sufficient evidence … Fuld was at least grossly negligent in causing Lehman to file misleading periodic reports.” Why did Lehman tamper with its financials? To persuade credit rating agencies that it had reduced the riskiness of its portfolio, even though it hadn’t. Ultimately, creditors lost faith in the firm, and it went bankrupt. No criminal charges were filed against Fuld and his associates, but they agreed to pay $90 million to settle a class action that accused them of misleading investors.
THE MIND BEHIND THE CRIME
“[ACFE founder and Chairman] Joe Wells got me to rethink my approach to white-collar crime detection when he said, ‘Books and records don’t commit fraud; people do,’ ” Marks recalls. “When I heard that, I asked myself, ‘Why aren’t we profiling organizations’ key individuals?’ Some might think that’s not acceptable, but times have changed.
“Cressey devised the fraud triangle in the 1950s,” Marks says. “Everyone was on a straight-line pay structure; now it’s pay for performance. That’s completely different. If we don’t keep up with the new ways fraudsters operate, they’ll beat us.”
In Marks’ view, many investigators and fraud examiners are too focused on documents and don’t spend enough time trying to understand the mind behind the crime.
“You can’t identify a fraudulent environment or behavior sitting at a desk, looking at papers,” he says. “Go out into the conference rooms and hallways, introduce yourself to people, observe how they act.”
Marks was an auditor earlier in his career. During most of his engagements, he typically would spend significant time developing an understanding of the business, the culture, staff interactions and information flow. Marks recalls one situation in which the company wanted him to concentrate on its inventory, so he spent time getting to know the employee responsible for that area. As they spoke, Marks sensed the employee’s uneasiness and consequently conducted the audit with more skepticism than usual. Marks asked the employee to clarify some puzzling transactions. The employee finally said, “Senior management is forcing me to make these phony entries, and I want to come clean about it.”
Accounts had disappeared in the opening inventory for each period; journal entries and phony obsolescence write-offs had masked them. According to Marks, well-placed insiders had devised a scheme to sell inventory to several outside parties. They had concealed the fraud by cooking the books and had converted the misappropriated inventory into cash.
TURN THE TABLES
Marks explains how a successful fraudster is adept at surrounding himself with a false aura of integrity. If he succeeds, you pay less attention to how he acts and what he asks you to do for him. And as you begin to consider him a “good guy,” your natural skepticism plummets.
“Why not use such manipulative behavior as a fraud detection criterion?” Marks asks. “White-collar criminals profile us; we should profile them.”
So, detecting financial statement fraud — in the era of big-dollar M&A — is a layered process. But CFEs take the holistic approach in finding evidence: They use ratio analysis and learn the audit process but also profile personality types — and most importantly — leave their desks and ask questions.
Robert Tie, CFE, CFP, is a contributing editor at Fraud Magazine and a New York business writer.
Resources
“What do you have for me?” the CEO asks.
“A potential acquisition that could help cover our tracks on other matters,” his CFO replies and hands over a spreadsheet. “One complication: They might’ve been goodwill hunting without a license.”
“Imagine that,” the CEO says, smirking as he eyes the numbers.
“They took a possibly bogus charge after buying a competitor, but it dovetailed nicely with the commodities nosedive. Bold and smooth. Not on par with our game, of course.”
“So few are,” the CEO says. “If you think we can use them more than they might try to use us, kick legal into due dillie mode and draft a pitch for my review. I don’t want this to distract our beloved board members from their gourmet lunch next quarter. And unless I say otherwise, you and I will communicate about this entirely offline.”
“Will do. At a minimum, it should pay off as well as the Asian takeover we did two years ago. Yeah, they hosed us for $8 mil. But we wrote off 23, and no one questioned it. I love my powerboat.”
“Sweet. I want an even bigger margin on this one. Make it happen.”
“Right.”
LAYERS OF DECEPTION
The above conversation never took place. But there’s nothing imaginary about the attitudes and techniques it illustrates.
“It would be an understatement to say that fraudsters are creative and opportunistic,” says Alton Sizemore, CFE, CPA. “That’s why two-way fraud schemes are more common than some investigators realize.”
After a 25-year FBI career, Sizemore is director of investigations for Forensic Strategic Solutions, a forensic accounting firm with offices in Birmingham, Dallas and Washington, D.C.
“Should we care if one crook bilks another?” he asks. “Absolutely. The cheated one will find an innocent victim to absorb his loss.”
Fraudsters don’t worry that much about losing money when they acquire a company that might have fraudulently overstated its assets and hidden liabilities to spur a run-up in its market value, Sizemore adds. Honest acquirers would run in the opposite direction. But fraudsters see it primarily as an opportunity to commit a bigger fraud of their own, in which they write off much more than they overpaid. And their subsequent goodwill write-down offsets and helps conceal embezzlements from their company. [The American Institute of CPAs’ Statement on Standards for Valuation Services No. 1 defines goodwill as “… that intangible asset arising as a result of name, reputation, customer loyalty, location, products, and similar factors not separately identified.”]
“Even when results don’t fulfill the fraudsters’ expectations, they don’t take the hit; shareholders do,” Sizemore says. “It’s always heads, they win; tails, others lose.”
SMOKE OR FIRE?
It can, however, be hard to tell if either or both participants in a merger and acquisition (M&A) deal have misstated their financials. A current high-profile dispute exemplifies this, with each party to a massive acquisition accusing the other of false statements.
In 2011, HP bought U.K. software maker Autonomy for $10 billion. But the following year, HP stunned the markets when it wrote off most of the deal’s value, alleging in a statement that $5 billion of its charge was due to “a willful effort on behalf of certain former Autonomy employees to inflate the underlying financial metrics of the company in order to mislead investors and potential buyers.”
Autonomy’s erstwhile head fired back that HP was trying to find a scapegoat for its own incompetence. “I utterly reject all allegations of impropriety,” wrote former Autonomy CEO Dr. Michael R. Lynch in an open letter to HP’s board. “Can HP really state that no part of the $5 billion write-down was, or should be, attributed to HP’s operational and financial mismanagement of Autonomy since the acquisition?” he asked.
The U.S. Department of Justice and the U.K. Serious Fraud Office are looking into the matter. When pressed to publicly reveal specifics underlying its fraud allegations against Autonomy, HP announced it won’t do so until the dispute reaches court.
“While Dr. Lynch is eager for a debate,” HP announced in its statement, “we believe the legal process is the correct method in which to bring out the facts and take action on behalf of our shareholders. In that setting, we look forward to hearing Dr. Lynch and other former Autonomy employees answer questions under penalty of perjury.”
With so little to go on, it’s hard to say whether HP can prove Autonomy committed financial statement fraud. But HP’s deliberate pace and apparent confidence imply it just might have accomplished two tasks essential to successful litigation in this context:
- Identifying specific accounting and/or financial reporting standards that Autonomy violated.
- Obtaining hard evidence of those alleged violations.
FINDING THE EVIDENCE
“Financial statement fraud often involves so-called ‘topside’ journal entries that produce a desired, but not necessarily accurate or legitimate, effect on the numbers,” says Gerry Zack, CFE, CPA, CIA, founder and president of Zack, P.C., an audit, anti-fraud and risk advisory firm near Washington, D.C.
For example, Zack explains, all accounts receivable activity takes place in a subsidiary ledger — its totals feed the general ledger, which flows into the financial statements. However, as their name implies, topside journal entries aren’t made in subsidiary ledgers. That’s because fraudulent transactions in subsidiary ledgers are visible to many employees. So, when possible, fraudsters post their bogus journal entries topside.
Fraudsters also try to hide their activities from auditors. With companies routinely posting enormous numbers of transactions, auditors can examine only limited samples whose monetary value equals a set, undisclosed minimum amount. But if fraudsters somehow learn the auditor’s materiality threshold, it’s a simple matter for them to keep all their fraudulent transactions below that amount and greatly reduce the chance the auditors will ever notice their illegitimate entries.
To satisfy the markets, Zack says, the perpetrators of one of the largest frauds in U.S. history made hundreds of journal entries just below the materiality threshold their company’s auditors observed. The infamous company’s name? HealthSouth.
HealthSouth’s avoidance of its auditor’s materiality factor is something Forensic Strategic Solutions’ Sizemore will never forget. As the Birmingham, Ala., FBI office’s assistant special agent in charge, he managed the 2003 HealthSouth investigation. Sizemore’s account of the $2.7 billion financial statement fraud (“Sniffing for Cooked Books,” ACFE article, Aug. 2010) illustrates the detective power of financial statement ratio analysis.
Sizemore describes another financial statement fraud auditors should have detected. Just for Feet was a discount shoe retailer, headquartered in Birmingham, with outlets in 40 states. By the time the scheme ended, the per-share price of Just for Feet stock had plunged from $29 to $1.25. A competitor acquired the company after five of its top executives cooperated with investigators and were convicted of felonies.
As in the HealthSouth fraud, there were numerous conspicuous indications of potential fraud. “Noticing some of them required no more than common sense,” Sizemore says. “For example, with a $400 million inventory, Just for Feet could offer every size, make and model of all major brand shoes. But not everyone needs size 13 green tennis shoes. So those models sat on the shelf and became obsolete. When Just for Feet’s CPA firm did the annual audit, it estimated the value of obsolete inventory at $150,000 instead of at $100 million, which would have been a conservative estimate. Red flags don’t come any bigger or brighter than that, but the auditors ignored it on Just for Feet’s financial statements, and investors were duped.”
CFEs can learn much from studying the audit process and its objectives, Sizemore says. The better they understand it, the more capable they’ll be of independently obtaining and analyzing information, such as comparing their company’s financial ratios to industry standards and prior periods and business cycles.
“Approach that task with professional skepticism,” he advises. “If a ratio value doesn’t make sense to you, seek out the people responsible for it — up or down the information supply chain — until you get a clear and reasonable explanation. If someone tells you they plug in a number to make the financial statements look better, you have an issue for law enforcement.” (For more information on ratio analysis, see the ACFE’s 2013 Fraud Examiners Manual, 1.243, 1.244.)
CFEs not trained as auditors can gain greater insight into that profession by exploring the auditing standards issued and enforced by the U.S. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), a private-sector nonprofit entity, created by the U.S. Sarbanes-Oxley Act, with quasi-governmental regulatory powers and responsibilities. (See the resources list at the end of this article for a list of those standards most pertinent to material misstatements in financial reports.)
HIGHER HURDLE
Proving intent in a financial statement fraud case has never been easy. But a 2011 federal court verdict has made it even more difficult. The U.S. Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, affirmed a lower court ruling that rejected plaintiffs’ claims in Fait v. Regions Financial Corporation, et al, an investor class action complaint. The suit sought damages from a bank that had issued allegedly negligent false and misleading statements concerning goodwill and loan loss reserves related to its recent acquisition of another bank.
“The Second Circuit held that when a company’s management makes an estimate of, for example, goodwill in its financial statements, that estimate is an opinion,” says John C. Coffee Jr., Adolf A. Berle Professor of Law at Columbia Law School in New York (and 2011 recipient of the ACFE’s Cressey Award). “To hold the company liable for such an opinion, you must show not only that it was inaccurate, but also that the company did not believe it. The latter requirement is a new and higher hurdle [for prosecutors and plaintiffs] to overcome.”
A company’s communications might contain information supporting a claim that the company didn’t believe its estimate. “For example,” Coffee says, “a rating agency assigns a triple A rating to an investment product that one of its staff — in a contemporaneous email — describes as ‘not even B class.’ However, you don’t get discovery that can find such emails until you have applied with particularity sufficient facts that give rise to an inference of fraud.”
800 POUNDS AND ABSOLUTELY BANANAS
“Many CFEs want to optimize their ability to detect potential fraud and, where appropriate, establish probable cause for an investigation,” says Jonathan Marks, CFE, CPA, partner-in-charge of Crowe Horwath LLP’s fraud, ethics and anti-corruption practice. “Developing their awareness of employee personality traits and behavior is a good way to do that.”
To illustrate, he cites the case of Richard S. Fuld, Jr., former president of the now-defunct investment bank Lehman Brothers. In recognition of Fuld’s intense personality and aggressive style, associates called him “the gorilla.” A notorious 2007 bootleg video conveys a striking impression. In it, Fuld tells an audience of colleagues, business leaders and government officials how he feels about short sellers of Lehman Brothers stock. “I want to reach in, rip out their heart and eat it before they die,” he says.
“Fuld was so overbearing and arrogant that no one — including Lehman’s board — questioned his actions until it was too late,” Marks says.
Anton Valukas, the bankruptcy examiner appointed to look into the reasons for Lehman’s collapse said in his report, “There is sufficient evidence … Fuld was at least grossly negligent in causing Lehman to file misleading periodic reports.” Why did Lehman tamper with its financials? To persuade credit rating agencies that it had reduced the riskiness of its portfolio, even though it hadn’t. Ultimately, creditors lost faith in the firm, and it went bankrupt. No criminal charges were filed against Fuld and his associates, but they agreed to pay $90 million to settle a class action that accused them of misleading investors.
THE MIND BEHIND THE CRIME
“[ACFE founder and Chairman] Joe Wells got me to rethink my approach to white-collar crime detection when he said, ‘Books and records don’t commit fraud; people do,’ ” Marks recalls. “When I heard that, I asked myself, ‘Why aren’t we profiling organizations’ key individuals?’ Some might think that’s not acceptable, but times have changed.
“Cressey devised the fraud triangle in the 1950s,” Marks says. “Everyone was on a straight-line pay structure; now it’s pay for performance. That’s completely different. If we don’t keep up with the new ways fraudsters operate, they’ll beat us.”
In Marks’ view, many investigators and fraud examiners are too focused on documents and don’t spend enough time trying to understand the mind behind the crime.
“You can’t identify a fraudulent environment or behavior sitting at a desk, looking at papers,” he says. “Go out into the conference rooms and hallways, introduce yourself to people, observe how they act.”
Marks was an auditor earlier in his career. During most of his engagements, he typically would spend significant time developing an understanding of the business, the culture, staff interactions and information flow. Marks recalls one situation in which the company wanted him to concentrate on its inventory, so he spent time getting to know the employee responsible for that area. As they spoke, Marks sensed the employee’s uneasiness and consequently conducted the audit with more skepticism than usual. Marks asked the employee to clarify some puzzling transactions. The employee finally said, “Senior management is forcing me to make these phony entries, and I want to come clean about it.”
Accounts had disappeared in the opening inventory for each period; journal entries and phony obsolescence write-offs had masked them. According to Marks, well-placed insiders had devised a scheme to sell inventory to several outside parties. They had concealed the fraud by cooking the books and had converted the misappropriated inventory into cash.
TURN THE TABLES
Marks explains how a successful fraudster is adept at surrounding himself with a false aura of integrity. If he succeeds, you pay less attention to how he acts and what he asks you to do for him. And as you begin to consider him a “good guy,” your natural skepticism plummets.
“Why not use such manipulative behavior as a fraud detection criterion?” Marks asks. “White-collar criminals profile us; we should profile them.”
So, detecting financial statement fraud — in the era of big-dollar M&A — is a layered process. But CFEs take the holistic approach in finding evidence: They use ratio analysis and learn the audit process but also profile personality types — and most importantly — leave their desks and ask questions.
Robert Tie, CFE, CFP, is a contributing editor at Fraud Magazine and a New York business writer.
Resources
- Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) Auditing Standards.
- Established by the U.S. Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002 to improve the quality of audits of public companies, the PCAOB registers, inspects, and, when necessary, disciplines accounting firms that perform such audits.
- Auditing Standard No. 5: An Audit of Internal Control Over Financial Reporting That Is Integrated with An Audit of Financial Statements.
- Auditing Standard No. 11: Consideration of Materiality in Planning and Performing an Audit.
- Auditing Standard No. 12: Identifying and Assessing Risks of Material Misstatement.
- Auditing Standard No. 13: The Auditor’s Responses to the Risks of Material Misstatement.
The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners assumes sole copyright of any article published on www.Fraud-Magazine.com or ACFE.com. Permission of the publisher is required before an article can be copied or reproduced.
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