Fraud Orchestrated By Three Senior Executives Of Fair Finance Company

In this case, there are several conspirators who is involved in the fraud receiving punishment from either SEC or federal government. Robert Levin, the AMRE executive and major stockholder, and Dennie D.Brown, the company’s chief accounting officer, were subject to the punishment in the form of a huge amount of fine by the SEC and the federal government. This punishment came from reasons. After AMRE going public, the company have the obligation to publish its financial reports but its performance did not meet expectation. The investigation by SEC shows that Robert took the first step of this scam, fearing the sharp drop of AMRE’s stock price because of the poor performance of company. He abetted Brown, to practice three main schemes to present a false appearance of profitable and pleasant financial reports. Firstly, they instructed Walter W.Richardson, the company’s vice president of data processing, to enter fictitious unset leads in the lead bank and they originally deferred the advertising cost mutiplying “cost per lead” and “unset leads” amount, so that they deferred a portion of its advertising costs in an asset account. The capitalizing of advertising expenses allowed them to inflate the net income for the first quarter of fiscal 1988. Secondly, at the end of the third and fourth quarters of fiscal 1988, they added fictitious inventory to AMRE’s ending inventory records, and prepared bogus inventory count sheets for the auditors. Thirdly, they overstated the percentage

The Enron and WorldCom scandals were arguably the incidents that permanently changed the procedures for accounting controls. In response to these incidents, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) of 2002 was passed. Once the knowledge of these scandals was made public, a number of subsequent accounting scandals were discovered in public companies such as Tyco International, HealthSouth, and American Insurance Group. In addition, a then-employee-owned company, Post, Buckley, Schuh & Jernigan, Inc. (dba PBS&J, now known as “Atkins North America, Inc.”), was also hit by a similar accounting scandal. Henceforth, a case study of PBS&J is presented where we will examine the fraudulent transactions that

From year-end 2004 through the first-quarter 2008, defendant Brian Fox misled the investing public by fraudulently inflating the revenue and assets and fraudulently omitting major liabilities, of Powder River Petroleum International, Inc. (“Powder River” or the “company”) in the company’s Commission filings, and by making other false and misleading public disclosures. From year-end 2004, Powder River conveyed working interests in oil and gas leases to investors in Asia for over $43 million. Because Powder River promised full repayment of the working interest

For instance, the funds owed the company by the Rigas family went undisclosed in the statements, because the management at Adelphia deemed such disclosure as being “unnecessary” (Barlaup, Hanne, & Stuart, 2009). Given that Adelphia was a publicly traded company, the purposeful non-disclosure caused potential investors to rely on financial records that were grossly misleading. The inevitable result was the investors continued to inject money into a company that had all the appearances of profitability and sustained growth, but that was, in reality, rapidly becoming insolvent. Moreover, lending institutions also relied on the “independently-audited” financial statements, and they were more than eager to loan the company money, given Adelphia’s presumed state of financial “profitability.”

At an early age, Barry Minkow was introduced to the carpet cleaning industry by his mother who worked part time as a telephone solicitor for a small carpet cleaning company. This insight of the industry allowed Minkow to understand that the carpet cleaning industry was one which had very few barriers to entry, no licensing requirements, and required only a small amount of capital to enter. Also, because of these few barriers to entry, the industry has historically attracted a larger number of faulty startups in comparison to other industries. At 16 years old, Minkow started his carpet cleaning company under the name of ZZZZ Best Company. Right away he had a difficult time with customer

Overview of the Case: The Securities and Exchange Commission claims Mark D. Begelman misused proprietary information regarding the merger of Bluegreen Corporation with BFC Financial Corporation. Mr. Begelman allegedly learned of the acquisition through a network of professional connections known as the World Presidents’ Organization (Maglich). Members of this organization freely share non-public business information with other members in confidence; however, Mr. Begelman allegedly did not abide by the organization’s mandate of secrecy and leveraged private information into a lucrative security transaction. As stated in the summary of the case by the SEC, “Mark D. Begelman, a member of the World Presidents’ Organization (“WPO”), abused

The McDonald’s Monopoly game fraud was discovered in August of 2001, when it was revealed that certain employees of Simon Marketing and associates had colluded to

On May 8, 2013, U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff issued a two-page ruling that dismissed the claims in the lawsuit seeking penalties under the False Claims Act, but allowed the claims that sought penalties under Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act (FIRREA) to advance. The relevance of the False Claims Act and the FIRREA Law will be further explored in this case. (Viswanatha, Aruna, 2013)

Gregory was the owner of all shares of United Mortgage Company. United Mortgage owned 1000 shares of stock in Monitor Securities Corporation. Gregory then created Averill Corp and transferred the 1000 shares in Monitor Securities to Averill. Then, she dissolved Averill and those 1000 shares in Monitor went back to her. That same

What aspects of the schemes described in this case were: a) unethical, b) illegal, and/or c) fraudulent?

See, e.g., U.S. v. Gordon, 08-21103-Jordan (S.D. Fla. 2008) (bank’s managing director altered individual’s credit data to inflate mortgage pools’ apparent quality and value upon sale to investors); U.S. v. Levine, 1:09-CR-00554 (N.D. Ga. 2009) (executive vice president in charge of bank’s community redevelopment lending department accused of knowingly over-valuing bank assets (loans to flippers) in reports to the OCC and the FDIC; the defendant is expected to plead guilty in January, 2010).. 17 See, e.g., U.S. v. Sailor, 1:08-CR-105, superseding information (N.D. Ga. 2008). 18 See, e.g., U.S. v. Sprouts, 2:08-CR-0051 (W. D. Pa. 2008). 19 See, e.g., U.S. v.

On February 10, 2015, the CFPB announced a consent order with NewDay Financial, LLC (NewDay) regarding two violations resulting from its marketing practices. First, the order states that NewDay’s marketing constituted unfair and deceptive acts and practices (UDAAP) in violation of Dodd-Frank. Second, NewDay engaged in referral arrangements with a veteran’s group that violate the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act’s (RESPA) prohibition against kickbacks for referrals of federally related mortgage loans. The CFPB assessed a $2 million civil money penalty under the consent order. The facts as described in the consent order do not involve typical marketing service agreements; however, the consent order makes clear that endorsements of a company

Ashley Johnson is the sole owner of Johnson Real Estate, hereby referred to as “JRE”, which is a sole proprietorship (LLC) that lists and sells real estate in West Virginia. Ashley’s husband James is the president of JRE and is the day to day operator. Besides James, there are two employees: office manager Joan Rogers and receptionist Doris Chambers. The realtors are contracted sub-agents that personally collect commission checks at the end of each month. These realtors receive 65% of the commission granted to the broker, the rest is deposited into JRE’s checking account. Ashley noticed discrepancies in the commission receipts from closings and the actual bank deposits in the year of 20X9. The previous year there were no problems. JRE has not been audited for the past three years due to rapid growth. Ashley filed a report with the local prosecutor, a family friend, and requested a thorough investigation, which resulted in the prosecutor’s office contracting an accounting firm to complete the financial examination. The prosecutor’s office assigned special agents Thomas and Longworth to the case. The prosecutors are Gina Conrad and Barry Morton.

Many organizations have been in the news over the past few years due to accounting ethical breaches that have affected their customers, employees, and the general public. I searched the Internet to locate a story in the news that depicts an accounting ethical breach. I selected Krispy Kreme. I enjoy their hot donuts and was curious to learn more about how they played with the numbers. For some reason I always want to dig into the trickery behind the manipulation of financial statements.

Main character in this fraud is Mr. Dennis Kozlowski, the CEO of Tyco. He misappropriated around $270 million through unauthorized loans, sale of Tyco securities and undisclosed compensation. In order to conceal these amounts, the compensation was incorrectly offset against unrelated gains. This led to violation of GAAP and misrepresented financial statements. For example, $44.6 million of bonuses were offset against gain from IPO of one of Tyco’s subsidiaries. They have also netted the bonuses with gain on disposal of business and gain on sale of common stock. According to ASC 718 Compensation, these and other bonuses should have been disclosed in operating earnings and should have decreased operating income. However, since they were offset against one-time gains, they did not have any impact on operating income. This “hiding” of compensation occurred on several occasions – the expenses were also netted against gain on sale