Phar Mor Fraud Case

Garcia and Licata took a number of old invoices and issued checks in the invoice amount, subsequently cashing the checks and splitting the amount between themselves. DeLoach soon after joined them and deposited a number of checks, issued by Licata, into various personal accounts throughout Miami. DeLoach used the funds from the fraudulent checks to write checks to Garcia and Licata (Barnett, 2007).

This court report is respectfully submitted to update the court on the CRA matter regarding Kevonah Renaud-Harris. On 5/25/2017, Ms. Adrienne Harris, mother of Kevonah filed a CRA. On 5/26/2017, this case was assigned to me to complete a Comprehensive Assessment which is due to be completed on or before 8/21/2017.

The reporting party (RP) stated her two granddaughters Harper Lopez age 2 years and Luciana Lopez age 4 is receiving care and supervision from the providers Tosha and Vincent Cuvea. In addition to the RP two grandchildren the providers are care for children from 5 different parents. According to the RP the two children receives care from a licensed provider Ruth Veile (Facility #313613048) during the day and spends the evening with the unlicensed provider. Subsequently the children are in care for several days at a time while their mother is away. The RP stated Tosha Cuvea is a fabricator and a fraud.

In improving a publicly traded company’s bottom line Sarbanes-Oxley can be a positive factor. By introducing ethics codes and internal controls and building an ethical mind-set in a

Without a question the BOD should have placed a high degree of reliance on Andersen, which at the time was one of the most prestigious worldwide accounting firms. The auditors should have known the kind of accounting taking place in Enron. In my opinion, Andersen knew, at least to some extent, the company’s financial condition. However, Enron was already too deep under water that blowing the whistle so late would have created problems for Andersen as well. According to the case, on 02/05/01, Andersen held internal meeting during which it addressed the company’s accounting from and oversight of the LJM partnership. Andersen never discussed these concerns with the Audit and Compliance Committee. Although the BOD has its faults, it should have been able to rely on Andersen’s work.

The purpose of this memo is to provide you with information on the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX Act) and to describe the importance of its implementation, per your request. The SOX Act was first introduced in the house as the “Corporate and Auditing Accountability, Responsibility, and Transparency Act of 2002” by Michael Oxley on February 14, 2002. Paul Sarbanes, a Democrat U.S. Senator, collaborated with Mr. Oxley, a Republican US Senator, creating significant bipartisan support. The SOX Act was enacted by the end of July 2002 in response to recent corporate accounting scandals. The twin scandals that were impetus for the legislation involved the corporations of Enron and WorldCom.

He was able to take advantage of the five-day grace period between a check being credited at one bank branch and a debit being made at the account’s branch by routinely making fraudulent credits and debits on MAPS (Mohammed Ali Professional Sports, INC) which he had a became a board member and which was a local customer of Wells Fargo and held 13 accounts at different branches in and around Los Angeles. He increased the amount each time. $21.3 million was embezzled between 1977 and 1981 which is equivalent to $64 million in 2010. Lewis himself pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy and two counts of embezzlement and agreed to cooperate with the prosecution in their case against Smith and Marshall with Marquet International, Ltd. Lewis was ultimately sentenced to 5 years in prison. In February 1982, Harold Smith, a flamboyant boxing promoter, who was also a part of the scheme, was convicted on 29 felony counts including fraud, embezzlement, conspiracy and interstate transportation of stolen securities. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison of which he actually served 5¼.

The reporting party (RP) stated there is a belief that the licensee and Maria Dickerson are committing fraud. According to the RP the licensee is never available. The RP stated Maria Dickerson lives in the licensed home with her son. The RP stated when they arrive to the facility Maria is the person providing care within 10-15 minutes the licensee would arrive at the home. There were a few occasions when the RP made visits she only communicated with the licensee over the telephone. The RP stated the licensee never answers the phone call made to (916) 806-8085 however, the licensee would return calls made to that phone number.

The organizational structure of Phar-Mor was ineffective and lacked many control activities including: segregation of duties, authorization, documentary and IT controls. As a result, Phar-Mor’s president had a stronghold on certain upper level management and executives which gave him the opportunity to control the fraud and hide it from other members of the organization and supposedly Phar-Mor’s auditors, Coopers and Lybrand LLP.

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

As in the case with Enron, auditors didn’t do their jobs. In this case, the auditing company was Coopers&Lybrant. In order to realize the fraud, Mickey Monus and other had to put all their losses into expense accounts and come up with the way of boosting their asset accounts. They came up with an idea of inflating inventory. This wouldn’t be possible to do if Coopers&Lybrant wouldn’t do their job negligently. As video states, they were the lowest bid on Phar-Mor’s case, so they didn’t want to spend too much money on their audit. As a result, they checks only 4 stores out of 129. Moreover, they told Phar-Mor’s management in advance which stores will be checked.

Further, the bucket account was to steal money and direct those funds to other services outside of normal company business. “The whistle was blown when a Phar-Mor check was written to cover the World Basketball League expenses of the private investment of CEO Monus” (Williams,2011, p58). Furthermore, the senior financial officers were previous auditors of the organization external auditing firm.

The Leslie Fay Companies (Leslie Fay) was a designer specializing in women’s stylish dresses. The company was run by Fred Pomerantz and subsequently by his son, John Pomerantz. Both Pomerantz men were known for their lavish lifestyles and overbearing personalities. Fred had hired Paul Polishan right out of college in 1969 to join the accounting staff at Leslie Fay. Polishan would later go on to become the company’s CFO. Polishan, as it seemed, had an even more overbearing personality than either of the Pomerantz men. The personalities and attitudes of these three men would bring about a huge fraud scandal for Leslie Fay, resulting in a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing in April 1993 (Knapp, 2011).

A business can not work out without an account system, which includes internal. Internal controls are used by companies to make sure financial information is accurate and valid. Strong internal controls are signs of a financially healthy company and protect the company’s integrity. Strong internal controls can also increase a company’s profitability. There are several types of internal controls that companies used to protect themselves such as: Segregation of duties, asset purchases, supervisor review, internal audits and adequate documents and records. This paper will discuss several topics from a case study about And the Fraud

These changes were outlined in the Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX). SOX completely revolutionized financial reporting, requiring senior management of firms to sign off on each financial statement that the company issues. It also stipulated that wrongful doing can result in not only termination but also imprisonment. SOX amplified the requirement for companies, requiring firms to maintain proper levels of internal controls when it comes to operating activities. SOX also established the creation of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) which implemented stricter auditing standards for public accounting firms. Not only were accounting firms required to consider internal controls, but they were also required report any significant deficiency directly to the board of directors. SOX stressed the importance of internal controls, and within internal controls it established the need for segregation of duties. Since this time, there have been many additions to accounting policies regards segregations of duties, and many functions of the business process dedicated to it.