Teardowns and case studies on transaction risk, internal embezzlement, and the structural limits of sampling-based review.
Divorce can create an immediate information imbalance. What records a spouse can lawfully gather, what IRS transcripts actually show, and how to match the right resource to the financial issues in the case.
Read the articleWhy 5–10% sampling leaves a structural "Audit Gap" in M&A due diligence, and how full-population forensic analytics would have surfaced the JPMorgan/Frank $175M writedown and Optum's ghost employee scheme before close.
Read the analysisShort teardowns of recent fraud cases, what happened, the ACFE typology at play, and where standard review missed it. Originally shared on LinkedIn.
A law firm's bookkeeper wrote hundreds of checks to herself and booked them as vendor payments. For twelve years, nobody compared what the bank paid to what the books said.
A bookkeeper with four decades of tenure moved $205,889 through wires, Amazon orders, and her own bills. Nothing about it was clever. Nobody was looking.
A charity CFO forged checks and rewrote QuickBooks to cover it. A case study in the difference between an audit and an answer.
Fake vendors named after real suppliers, 142 diverted payments, and an owner who never saw it in the monthly reports.
The High Museum's former COO kept every theft under $1,000 and approved them himself: engineered immateriality that sampling never catches.
A nursing home refund clerk, three accomplice businesses, and a kickback loop that ran two and a half years inside routine disbursements.
A bookkeeper's shell vendors cost a Fort Myers company $212,000 in four months. Finding it pre-close changes the entire conversation.
Eleven defendants, stolen elderly identities, and $17 million in loans that document-level review waved through.
Mobileum executives manufactured revenue and fictitious invoices built specifically to clear buy-side checks. The deal ended in bankruptcy.
The controller who would have caught the fraud was the one committing it. Eighteen months, zero internal flags.
A healthcare network CEO day-traded away $24 million of company money chasing losses. What sampling and management representations never catch.
Ghost vendors survive on paper. Open source geolocation data flags them before the first payment clears.
Unauthorized debit cards, ATM withdrawals, and a ledger edited to hide them. The control environment you inherit when you close a deal.
A medical office manager worked the payroll channel across two employers for nine years. Hidden payroll fraud and what diligence misses.
Seven years, $739K, and monthly financials produced by the person doing the stealing. Compromised oversight in plain sight.
A Wells Fargo branch manager skimmed $800K from ATM cash and falsified the bank's own records. Size is not a control.
Duplicated bonus checks, fabricated invoices, forged bank statements. The person who would have caught it was the person doing it.
The Hawks' SVP of Finance ran the card program, the reimbursement platform, and the people who checked both. $3.7 million later, an NBA franchise learned the lesson.
The ACFE puts the median small business fraud loss at $110,000. The case for proactive, fixed-fee financial health checks.
When long-time controllers control the approval cycle, how tenure converts into unchecked authority, and what the ledger shows before anyone suspects it.
Constructing and legitimizing commercial fraud. Drawn from the session presented with Nicole Ponziani at the ACFE Global Fraud Conference.
Ongoing notes on fraud typologies, payment risk, and financial crime enforcement.
Occasional notes on fraud typologies, transaction risk, and what the ledger shows. A few times a month at most.
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