ABSTRACT The quantity of accounting fraud cases keeps on rising. Fraud is a consistent thing that will reliably be around, and in a bigger number of routes than just a single. An extensive apportion of organizations out there fight with fraud, either from within the organization, or from outside the organization. Knowing how to manage this is essential for an organization to be productive over a drawn out extended period of time. The investigation regarding the matter of accounting fraud will utilize sources from the web and the DeVry school library. The principle territory we are planning to address is accounting fraud and how it could impact an organization by answering, the who, what, when and how. Its goal is to increase the awareness
It includes an employee or the organization and is deceptive to shareholders and investors. An organization can misrepresent its financial statements by exaggerating its income or resources, not recording costs and under-recording liabilities. A number of categories and sub-categories can be divided up for fraud. Some examples are consumer fraud, management fraud, employee embezzlement, Ponzi schemes and numerous
Dowd (2016) runs above and beyond with the clarification to state accounting fraud incorporates the change of accounting records in regards to sales, incomes, costs and different components for a profit motive, for example, boosting organization stock prices, getting ideal financing or maintaining a strategic distance from obligation commitments. Dowd is of the feeling that covetousness, absence of straightforwardness, poor administration data and poor accounting interior controls are a couple of explanations behind accounting fraud. (Dowd,
I believe that asset misappropriation by accounts payable fraud is occurring at Wayland Manufacturing Company due to a lack of proper internal controls. Making the company’s Chief Accountant responsible for additional day-to-day functions provides him with opportunity to commit by creating fictitious vendors with his information and then creating fictitious invoices. Newbaker can then conceal his fraud by approving the invoices for payment. Employees working at an organization for more than five years are more likely to commit fraud. Therefore, Newbaker’s six-year history with the company has made him trustworthy and very knowledgeable, which could indicate involvement in asset misappropriation. The high employee turnover could represent a past fraudster leaving before getting caught or employees refusing to continue with the asset misappropriation. In addition, the varying monthly accounts payable transactions ranging from the lowest being April 2014 and
Madura, Jeff. What Every Investor Needs to Know About Accounting Fraud. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004. 1-156
Forensic accounting is an investigative style of accounting used to verify whether a single or company has occupied with any illegal financial movement (Forensic Accounting Online, 2013). It is used to detect fraudulent activity such as false insurance claims, embezzlement, bribery, tax evasion, etc. Since forensic accounting has grown many companies now have departments specifically for forensic accounts to work. Forensic accounting consists of two areas, litigation and investigation. The litigation support part of a forensic accountant's job involves figuring out the amount lost by parties in a legal dispute while the investigation area of the profession involves combining the abilities of both accountants and detectives (Winters, 2008). This will be discussed more about later in the paper.
Giroux, G. (Winter 2008). What went wrong? Accounting fraud and lessons from the recent scandals. Social Research, 75, 4. p.1205 (34). Retrieved June 16, 2011, from Academic OneFile via Gale:
Accounting fraud refers to fraud that is committed by a company by maintaining false information about the sales and income in the company books, when overstating the company's assets or profits, when a company is actually undergoing a loss. These fraudulent records are then used to seek investment in the company's bond or security issues. By showing these false entries, the company attempts to apply fraudulent loan applications as a final attempt to save the company by obtaining more money from bankruptcy. Accounting frauds is actually done to hide the company’s actual financial issues.
While the analysis developed three broad categories of occupational fraud – corruption, asset misappropriation, and financial statement fraud – the individuals completing the analysis recognized there are multiple subsets to each of the categories. The fraud tree allows for the subsets to be addressed based on their individual characteristics. As mentioned in Wells (2017), not all deception is in fact fraud. With is thought in the back of our minds, the Fraud Tree will be important to this class because it will assist us in determining if there is a fraud being perpetrated and if there is, then what type(s) of fraud are being conducted by the perpetrators based on the facts of the
Nilsen, Kim., “Keeping Fraud in the Cross Hairs”. American Institute of Accountants, Inc., 2010, pp.20-27.
The Hollate Manufacturing case provided by Anti-Fraud Collaboration has well illustrated how several common issues in an organization contributed to the fraud’s occurrence. These issues can be categorized into two major groups: ethical culture (internal aspect) and internal control system (external aspect). By taking effective actions to enhance these two aspects, an organization can protect itself against the largest frauds, which result in financial and reputational damage.
Sandberg, J., Solomon, D., & Blumenstein, R. (2002, June 27). Accounting Spot-Check Unearthed A Scandal in WorldCom's Books. Retrieved from The Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB102512901721030520.html
Financial reporting is an example of an ethical problem for an organization or business. Many busin...
The standards recognize that fraud is often more difficult to detect because management or the employees perpetrating the fraud attempt to conceal the fraud. Even being difficult to detect fraud, it doesn’t change the auditor’s responsibility to properly plan and perform the audit to detect material misstatements.
Auditing has been the backbone of the complicated business world and has always changed with the times. As the business world grew strong, auditors’ roles grew more important. The auditors’ job became more difficult as the accounting principles changed. It also became easier with the use of internal controls, which introduced the need for testing, not a complete audit. Scandals and stock market crashes made auditors aware of deficiencies in auditing, and the auditing community was always quick to fix those deficiencies. Computers played an important role of changing the way audits were performed and also brought along some difficulties.
The Tyco accounting scandal is an ideal illustration of how individuals who hold key positions in an organization are able to manipulate accounting practices and financial reports for personal gain. The few key individuals involved in the Tyco Scandal (CEO Kozlowski and CFO Swartz), used a number of clever and unique tactics in order to accomplish what they did; including spring loading, manipulating their ‘key-employee loan’ program, and multiple ‘hush money’ payouts.
For those who do not know what fraud is, it’s basically deception by showing people what they want to see. In business it’s the same concept, but in a larger scale by means of manipulating figures that will be shown to shareholders and investors. Before Sarbanes Oxley Act there was “Enron Corporation”, a fortune 500 company that managed to falsify their statements claiming revenues over 101 billion in a span of 15 years. In order for us to understand how this corporation managed to deceive the public for so long, the documentary or movie “Smartest Guys in the Room” goes into depth by providing viewers with first-hand information from people that worked close with or for “Enron”.
Damages done by the fraud to any organization can be huge if not prevented. The main role of internal auditors in an organization is the detection and then prevention of fraudulent activity that is why the organizations are paying for them. Some fraud activities have happened in the Ajax Export Corporation. The fraud is done by accounts payable clerk with a quantity of $18,000 by writing checks to herself and charging the expense to miscellaneous account/ expense. This process according to the examination has occurred over the period of three years. The issues which are addressed may have the following recommendations.