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Financial Fraudsters

Purpose: Use this learning aid to read about some employees in various situations who carry out financial and accounting-related tasks to help you determine who is likely to be committing financial fraud.

Instructions for use: To use this tool, read the information provided and then complete the activity.

Deborah is in charge of payroll for her company. She's run up some personal credit card debt and needs to make a payment before the end of the month. She knows that a certain employee left her job two-thirds of the way through the month, so she amends the payroll to make it appear that the employee was still working up until the end of the month. Deborah then takes the extra wages for herself. She plans to "notice" the mistake and rectify it in a couple of months when she's out of her current financial troubles.

Alfie is a book buyer for school libraries for a university with multiple campuses around the state. He places a large order for many copies of an expensive textbook and directs one shipment to himself. He then adjusts the paperwork so that it appears the books have all been distributed, but instead, he sells the extra textbooks online. Since he's enabling students to buy the textbook from him more cheaply than they would get it in a bookstore, Alfie feels justified in his actions.

Anita is being transferred from one city to another. She's been told she can bill her employer for all moving costs. She hires a mover to pack up all her belongings and take them across the country by truck and pays for a plane ticket to travel herself. She charges both the mover's costs and the plane ticket to her employer.

Conrad works as a purchasing agent for a retail outlet. He has just chosen a new vendor to replace an existing one, but he forgets to close the account of the old supplier as required by company procedure. Subsequently, his assistant, Isaac, uses the old supplier account to create phony invoices, so that the retail outlet issues payments to him.

Leah receives a gift of a smartwatch from her employer as a reward for her high performance on a recent project. Instead of keeping the gift, she sells it to a local electronics retailer and spends the cash she receives on a vacation.