The Case Summaries For Phar Mor Inc. Fraud Essay

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.

During the time of the scandal, which broke in mid-2005, PBS&J had 4,000 employees in 75 offices in 24 states (Barnett, 2007). A number of high-profile projects were under construction with FDOT, OOCEA, and TxDOT. The funds from these projects were being brought into the firm at a rapid rate; however, PBS&J contained a flimsy internal controls system which facilitated the embezzlement that eventually took place. The major players of the scandal were located in the firm’s Miami office. They were Scott DeLoach, then chief financial officer (CFO); Maria Garcia, an accounting employee who was in charge of the office’s database and bank reconciliations; and Rosario Licata, a bookkeeper who maintained the firm’s benefits bank account (Eubanks, 2016).

Founders Michael “Mickey” Monus and David Shapira perpetrated financial fraud because there was conflict of interest involved with Monus supporting a World Basketball League with Phar-Mor’s revenue. With the help of the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Patrick “Pat” Finn $10 million was hidden in World Basketball League that Monus had founded. This was done by overstating the company’s inventory and earnings. Also, within 10 years of establishment Phar-Mor had grown to 300 stores and 25,000 employees which resulted in Phar-Mor having to borrow millions to fund this growth (Bloomberg Business.1992)

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

After reviewing the financial information of the Tech Tennis, USA, there was a concerned due to some unusual changes in the company’s accounts. Financial statements play a crucial part in the determination of the progress of an organization. It assists the relevant personnel to identify whether the company is making profits or making losses. Although unethical, some companies will tend to deliberately misrepresent some of their financial statement information to create a false impression of the company’s success. There are various techniques that organizations utilize to manipulate their financial statements such as overstating their revenues (Bierstaker, Brody, & Pacini, 2006). In addition, some organization will tend to inflate their sales without considering their cash flow amount that the organization has acquired which will be a red flag to investigate. Consequently, financial statements provide vital information that helps both internal and external users to understand the position of the organization. Some companies in an attempt to continue in the market, they end up manipulating their financial statements that create an illusion of the success of the organization.

Phar-Mor, Inc. applied a variety of different fraudulent reporting techniques to "cook the books" and commit one of the biggest corporate frauds in American history. A number of things were done to cover up the massive losses the company was taking including issuing fake invoices for merchandise purchases, making fake journal entries in order to increase inventory and decrease cost of sales, recognizing inventory purchases but then not accruing the corresponding liability, and over-counting merchandise.

The amount listed is the enrollment agreement was 10,020.00 which gives a difference of :

Between the years 2000 and 2002 there were over a dozen corporate scandals involving unethical corporate governance practices. The allegations ranged from faulty revenue reporting and falsifying financial records, to the shredding and destruction of financial documents (Patsuris, 2002). Most notably, are the cases involving Enron and Arthur Andersen. The allegations of the Enron scandal went public in October 2001. They included, hiding debt and boosting profits to the tune of more than one billion dollars. They were also accused of bribing foreign governments to win contacts and manipulating both the California and Texas power markets (Patsuris, 2002). Following these allegations, Arthur Andersen was investigated for, allegedly,

In the case of Phar-Mor fraud, the company was involved in cover up and some accounts were created to hide the fraudulent activities. Bad inventory counts in the stores were made to help with the cover up and deceit about activities that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. (Williams, S.L., 2011)

Phar-Mor was known as one of the major discount chain retailers in the late 1980’s - early 1990’s. It was founded by Mickey Monus, a gambler in nature, who with the help of senior management was “cooking the books” for years to cover up his loses. The reason why senior management agreed to do this fraud is the belief in unique ability of their leader to fix everything later on. This case is known as one of the biggest accounting frauds in the corporate history of the U.S. This paper will analyze who was affected by this fraud, the motives behind it and what systems of control failed to prevent it.

Mayes and other physicians at his former office, Heritage Medical Practice, had referred patients to Berkeley HeartLab in exchange for fees. Mayes said Monday he referred patients to Berkeley for a few months in 2010, after a company representative told them the referral fees were legal. He stopped after realizing the fees weren't legal and noticing the company was performing cholesterol tests he had not ordered on blood samples. At the time, Berkeley and other companies were promoting genetic tests as a way to get a better look at cholesterol levels. He contacted the company's representative about the tests, asking them to stop the practice, but it continued. When he asked patients to bring in their insurance explanation of benefits, one showed

The video “Cooking the Books” discussed the ZZZZ Best case of fraud, it tells how and why fraud was perpetrated by Barry Minkow and why it was undetected for so long. According to the video, ZZZZ Best was founded by Barry Minkow in 1982; when he was sixteen years old, it started as a carpet cleaning company. But, due to high competition in the industry, low entry barriers, and bad internal control, this young entrepreneur started to have cash flow problems, thus creating a shortage of working capital. As a result of the financial pressure, he started to commit fraud by creating false accounts receivable and sales, false documents (using photocopies of real

The Phar-Mor Inc. was founded 1982. The Phar-Mor company is located in about thirty-four states with at least 20,000 employees. However, in 1992 they had to file bankruptcy due to fraud one of the biggest cases before Enron. Phar-Mor Inc. consist of fictitious inventory that were used to cover up operation losses, personal expense that Monus’s used for his World Basketball League, but he hid them in the inventory expense account for several years. He had others to help him cover up the loss, such as, CFO, the Controller and Vice President as well as the accounting manager. So, this fraudulent activity of Phar-Mor was strictly top management that included the people who should have whistled blow the problem and that was the accounting firms, auditors but they helped Monus cover up the fraud for years that cause investors and employees over $500 million dollars.

1. a) Since the treasurer diverted a substantial amount of the fund’s earnings to his personal use and systematically underrecorded income earned, we could consider this as a financial reporting fraud. The auditor would have identified the risk primarily through analysis of financial results and review of operational procedures.

The greatest opportunity for Minkow to commit fraud was ZZZZ Best’s lack of financial supervision. Lack of internal control facilitated manipulation of company’s assets and transactions. It gave the CFO the opportunity to falsify the documents and to create fictitious transactions. These transactions created formidable revenues on the company’s books and made it easy to borrow money from banks. The weak external audit was the other opportunity that allowed Minkow to commit fraud. The auditor was not familiar with the company and its related parties. In addition, the auditors placed too much trust in management produced documents and failed to verify key transactions. These two important reasons gave Minkow an opportunity to commit fraud.