The Complete Guide to Spotting Accounting Fraud & Cover-ups

It is the job of the accounting department to scrutinize purchase orders and ascertain they have been properly authorized before paying the accompanying invoices.

second person to review a transaction and approve it or to compare cash receipts and sales documents before processing them.

the theft takes place before cash receipts are recorded

When a payment is not recorded, the customer’s account becomes overdue and questions are

Fraud involving theft of receivables or stolen checks is more difficult to conceal because the company is expecting payments from its customers.

Unrecorded sales of services may never be detected

Unrecorded and underreported sales can be concealed with relative ease because the transactions are never entered into company accounting records.

some cases, fraudsters have changed the address to which payments are sent so that the checks are routed to a private mailbox.

Situations where a single person prepares and sends out statements and receives and records payments are particularly conducive to this kind of theft.

The most basic form of skimming occurs when an employee sells goods or services to a customer, makes no record of the sale, and pockets the payment instead of turning it over to the employer.