The Spinster and the Dubious Investment

Small organizations: Beware of those longtime employees who have their hands in every department. They could be like alpha executive Francine Gordon, whose fraud gave her company headaches and grief. Learn lessons from this tale of misplaced trust, faulty internal controls and lack of segregation of duties.

This article is excerpted and adapted from the “Financial Statement Fraud Casebook: Baking the Ledgers and Cooking the Books,” edited by Dr. Joseph T. Wells, CFE, CPA, published by John Wiley & Sons Inc. ©2011 Used with permission. Names in this case are fictitious.  

All financial statement frauds are not in the billions of dollars. They only need to be big enough to be material to the financial statements.