Internal Auditing: Stock Market and Fraud

Fraud is defined as the intentional deception or misrepresentation of facts that can result in unauthorized benefit or payment. Abuse is

Ponzi Schemes also known as a multi-marketing organization are white-collar crime; it is essentially an individual swindling a quick investment from new investors. Always ends up with investors or victums losing “their shirt” all the profits and many cases the company and is bankrupted and the owner ends up in jail. Two very highly successful Ponzi schemes are Primerica group and Amway. Primerica Group sells insurance and financial services and Amway sells heath insurance, but it doesn’t matter what they sale, its all about recruitment. They take your hard earned money and invest it into there business for a bigger profit in the future for a retirement but many people who try to get some of there money back for emergency are sadly mistaken

The most common accounting fraud is the misrepresentation of financial statements which is frequently known as “cooking the books” and includes manipulation, falsification, or alteration of accounting records, intentional omission from the financial statements and intentional misapplication of accounting principles relating to amounts, classification, manner of presentation, or disclosure.

Fraudulent financial reporting is one form of corporate corruption and may involve the manipulation of the documents used to record accounting transactions, the misrepresentation of accounting events or transactions, or the intentional misapplication of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) (Crumbley, Heitger, and Smith, 2013). Examples of fraudulent schemes befitting of this category abound and usually involve financial statement items that have been misclassified, omitted, overstated, undervalued, or prematurely recognized. One case involving CEO Bill Smith of Moonstay

(TCO 5) Fraud is an intentional misrepresentation of facts, made for the purpose of persuading another party to act in a way that causes injury or damage to that party. In our readings and discussions we have seen several examples of fraud in business. Using that experience (1) provide an example of a common fraudulent practice in business with an explanation of how the practice works and (2) name and describe each of the elements of the Fraud Triangle.

Stock-Track Report Eugene Myslinsky - 208083420 Advice to people trading with real money & lessons learned 1. Performing fundamental and technical analysis is necessary. You must explore different channels where information relevant to the stocks in your portfolio exist, however, be vigilant of the sources you choose to follow when making decisions pertaining to your portfolio; make sure they are credible among the financial community. Also, news associated to publically traded stocks can be released before the market open and if you do not consistently analyze new information your portfolio has the potential to incur a significant loss in a short period of time.

The similar circumstance occurred with other companies. As such, the government decided that they must do something about this issue and in 2002 Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Not only this act had an immediate effect on us corporations, but the accounting profession was revolutionized by this new introduction. The act gave more regulatory power to lawyers, analysts, and auditors. WorldCom, who was one of the biggest bankruptcies in history, admitted to overstating profits by billions throughout the years. The

Bernie Madoff is attributable for having one of the biggest frauds in history; he was responsible for losing billions of dollars of investors’ money for over twenty years. Known as one of the fathers of the NASDAQ, he gained credibility early and was able to prey on different affluent groups to gain billions of dollars for ‘trading’ investments. Markopolos the whistleblower of the Madoff case saw this scheme from the beginning and attempted to warn the SEC, which proved to be unsuccessful.

The manipulation of accounts fraud scheme is generally fulfilled by employees in top management positions and it usually involves making understatements or overstatements on financial statements making it very hard to detect. The process followed as Troy Adkins, (2015) explains is very simple. The financial statements are either overstated to show different figures in the earnings on the income statements making them look better than they actually are or the earnings in the current periods are manipulated in such a way that the revenue is understated or they inflate the current year’s expenses. The second process includes making the financial statements look worse than they are in reality. Deloitte, (2009) explains a number of ways which the accounts are manipulated where as one of the ways is to manipulate the reported earnings directly. They further explained that overstating the

This paper introduces Bernard L. Madoff a fraudster who orchestrated a multi-billion dollar Ponzi scheme. The paper discusses elements that make up a Ponzi scheme and explains what a Ponzi scheme is. The paper goes on to introduce some of the victim’s and examines some reasons why someone might fall victim to a Ponzi scheme. The paper describes the three elements making up the fraud triangle and how they relate to the fraud and the fraudster. This paper covers Bernard Madoff’s background and history and how he committed the fraud analyzing the fraud triangle. The paper describes ways to correct the issue, accounting principles violated, and recommendations for a fix. Finally, the paper looks at internal and external controls violated and ends with a conclusion.

A Ponzi scheme is an illegal business practice in which new investor’s money is used to make payments to earlier investors. In many Ponzi schemes, the fraudsters focus on attracting new money to make promised payments to earlier-stage investors and to use for personal expenses, instead of engaging in any legitimate investment activity. The returns are repaid out of new investors’ principal, but not from profits. This can continue as long as new investors line up with cash, and old investors don’t try to withdraw too much of their money at once.

If there is one thing to avoid while being a stockbroker it is fraud! Fraud is simply the deliberate trickery of deceit in order to obtain a profit or dishonest advantage over someone. In each brokerage firm there are a select few of individuals that operate under the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to oversee the legal and illegal activities of a corporation. Jordan Belfort was responsible for training his employees to intentionally lie to clients as a means of earning substantial amounts of money. For

Fraud is defined as a deliberate misrepresentation that causes a person or business to suffer damages, often in the form of monetary losses through deception or concealment. And Occupational Fraud as defined by the ACFE is the use of one’s occupation for personal enrichment through the deliberate misuse or misapplication of the employing organization’s resources or assets. Traditional fraud triangle theory by Donald Cressey explains that propensity of fraud occurring in an organization lies on three critical elements which are Pressure, Opportunity, and Rationalization.

Further, our strategy involved paying attention to current events and attempting to use them to generate a return. For example, Horizon Pharmaceuticals’ stock price took a nosedive after an October 19th New York Times article suggested that Horizon was attempting to thwart Express Scripts’ attempts to lower the price of prescription drugs. The decision was made to buy 100 shares of stock in Horizon when its price spiraled down to a measly $14.62 per share, as we expected Horizon would do something to stop the bleeding, and historically has been a pretty volatile stock. Horizon came back with a scorching rebuttal in an open letter later that day, spiking its stock price more than 30% on October 23rd, and by October 28th, this move landed us our greatest return of any stock that we purchased and held until the end of the period: 18% (see appendix).

ZZZZ Best started as a carpet cleaning company. Barry Minkow founded ZZZZ Best in his parents’ garage in 1982 when he was only sixteen years old. Due to high competition in the industry, low enter barriers, and bad internal control, this young entrepreneur started to have cash flow problems, and a shortage of working capital.