Corporate Crime Task Force Created

It was announced on November 17th that President Obama's administration has created a Corporate Crime Task Force. U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said, "Mortgages, securities and corporate fraud schemes have eroded the public's confidence in the nation's financial markets and have led to a growing sentiment that Wall Street does not play by the same rules as Main Street."

The L.A. Times reported, "The Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force will attack what Holder called "unscrupulous executives, Ponzi scheme operators and common criminals" in much the same way that a similar task force created in 2002 by former President George W. Bush went after corporate malfeasance following the accounting scandals at Enron Corp. and WorldCom Inc."

The article continued: "The Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act authorized $245 million annually in 2010 and 2011 to hire hundreds of prosecutors, agents and other federal officials to pursue financial fraud. It also strengthened and expanded money laundering laws and other statutes to apply to fraud committed by private mortgage lenders."

Is this something that should worry executives and corporate boards? Or... is this much ado about nothing?

A Proactive Response to Fraud Risk and Fraud Detection - The Fraud Penetration Study

One of the few truly proactive approaches to fraud prevention and detection, a Fraud Penetration Study is the application of specific audit procedures to increase the likelihood of detecting fraud in a core business system. Unlike the traditional audit approach, the Fraud Penetration Study does not focus on controls or control effectiveness, but rather the authenticity of the transaction.

There are six steps to the Fraud Penetration Study: Risk Identification, Scenario Development, Concealment Analysis, Scoping, Data Mining, and Fraud Analysis.

• Fraud risk identification starts with understanding the types of fraud risk. The starting point is accepting the concept of inherent fraud schemes. Once this concept is accepted, the auditor must understand how the scheme would occur in the specific business system; often times referred a fraud scenario.


• The fraud scenario is built from understanding the variations of the scheme based on the opportunities for fraud, entities involved, internal controls in place, and business processes currently performed. In essence, the fraud scenario is how the inherent fraud scheme would occur in a company’s business process.


• After the fraud scenario is developed, the auditor must identify and understand the common concealment strategies used to hide the fraud in this scenario. Common fraud concealment strategies are false documents, false representations and false approvals. The auditor should identify the red flags associated with the concealment strategies.


• The structure of the fraud scenario defines the audit scope for the audit plan. The audit plan may have several fraud scenarios, but each fraud scenario needs its own data mining plan and its own fraud audit procedures. Also, the audit plan provides the auditor with the necessary information to find and reveal the fraud scenario.


• Using a data mining tool like ACL(1) or IDEA(1), a sample of vendors would be selected consistent with the fraud data profile for the identified fraud scenario. Building the fraud data profile is the most important step in the fraud audit process. The goal is to select a biased and discreet number of transactions that are more likely to be fraudulent on which fraud audit procedures can be performed.


• The purpose of the fraud audit procedure is to gather evidence that is created and stored external to the perpetrator to form the basis of the Fraud Analysis. The procedure should be designed to pierce the concealment strategy. In the false billing scheme, the weakness of the concealment strategy is that the vendor does not exist. If the auditor develops an audit procedure to show that the entity does not exist, the concealment strategy will be unveiled, and the fraud exposed.

Using this methodology, you will find out if there is fraud in your business and if done well, you will find it within the first 3 days of analysis.

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1 ACL is a registered trademark of ACL Corporation and IDEA is a registered trademark of Caseware IDEA.

Looking for Ghost Employees in a Retail Environment

Payroll Fraud, specifically “Ghost Employees” can create a significant financial burden on companies. How much? Well, according to Occupational Fraud and Abuse, by Joseph T. Wells, Obsidian Publishing Co. Inc., Ghost Employee Fraud has the highest median loss relative to all payroll fraud schemes at $275,000 per case. If it is happening at your company, it is hurting your company. Unfortunately for those of you in retail, you are one of the most susceptible.

What can be done?

A large retail organization, one of the Fortune 500 with well over 200,000 employees, has retained Vonya Global to search for Fraud in Payroll. Specifically we will be looking for Ghost Employees which (in our methodology) includes Fictitious Ghosts, No-Show Ghosts, Pre-employment Ghosts, Terminated Ghosts, Temporary Ghosts, Family/Friend Ghosts, and Temp Agency Ghosts.

Unlike an investigation, this project is a proactive approach to fraud detection. The company has no evidence or indication that payroll fraud is occurring, however they understand that based on their size and their industry they are susceptible. Our approach takes an inventory of all payroll data and files. Once we have all the information we will segregate it into groups with similar characteristics and through detailed data analysis we will identify anomalies. We are confident that we will identify Ghost Employees and as a result return hundreds of thousands of dollars to the company.

Contact us if you would like to find out more about this project or how we would help you identify fraud in your business.

House Financial Services Committee passes Garrett-Adler amendment

The anticipated roll-call vote on the Garret-Adler amendment happened today... passing by a 37-32 vote. The amendment would exempt Small Caps from SOX 404 compliance. There is a long way to go before this bill becomes law, but it is said that the White House supports the bill.

Is this amendment a good thing? You can start a discussion here or follow the one going on now on LinkedIn.

Investors Opposed to Further SOX Delays

The House Financial Services Committee is considering two amendments to either delay or repeal the requirement for SOX 404(b). The first would require separate studies by the Government Accountability Office and the Securities and Exchange Commission to evaluate the costs and benefits of complying with Section 404(b) for non-accelerated filers. The second would exempt all companies with less than $700 million in market capitalization from Section 404(b).

Investor groups quickly voiced their opposition to the amendments in an Oct. 26 letter to several key members of Congress. Signed by leaders from the Council of Institutional Investors, the Consumer Federation of America, the American Association of Individual Investors, and the CFA Centre for Financial Market Integrity, the letter opposes any effort to further defer or exempt any public companies from the internal control requirements of Section 404, which they say “would do a grave disservice to investors whose trust in the markets is an essential ingredient in any financial recovery.”

“It is our view that the Section 404(b) requirements under SOX provide significant benefits to investors, are valuable regardless of a company’s size and represent an appropriate use of a company’s resources given the importance a strong system of internal controls has in producing reliable financial reporting,” the letter states.

Excerpt taken from October 30, 2009 Compliance Week article written by Melissa Klein Aguilar

A roll-call vote is slated for November 4th.