Why specialize when you’re a forensic accountant? Forensic accounting is already a specialty within the broader field of accounting, so some people never consider that you can narrow down your practice even more. We focus on investigating numbers, but that […]
When the IRS believes a taxpayer has unreported income, they will use alternative methods to attempt to determine the true income. One of those methods is the Expenditures Method. Tracy Coenen explains the basic methodology in this video. Note that […]
Taxes: You’re guilty until you prove yourself innocent. That’s the way it works with the Internal Revenue Service. You have to be able to prove the numbers on your income tax return. If you can’t, the IRS auditor will pick […]
When an internal fraud (one committed by employees) occurs at a company, the natural reaction is to assume that an investigation must be started immediately. After all, it is important to determine who was involved, exactly how the fraud was […]
Schemes that involve the skimming of money are very difficult to detect, investigate, and ultimately prove. These types of schemes are carried out before money is recorded in a company’s accounting system. Because of this “off-books” nature of the crime, […]
Financial expert witnesses are the key to helping judges understand complex financial issues. It is imperative that the judge understand accounting and finance scenarios if you are to succeed in court. Tracy Coenen and Miles Mason discuss how your expert […]
Complex financial investigations involve large sets of data, numerous accounts, multiple players, and lightning fast movements of money. Being able to accurately document these movements of money is the key to the financial portion of a case, whether it involves […]
When investigating fraud, I often find it useful to perform analytical review on the financial statements of a company. Even when management is certain that they know where the fraud occurred within the accounting system, analytical review can help identify […]
Do you think it’s only the “bad” people who do bad things in multi-level marketing? Those who frontload new recruits, dial for dollars at the end of the month (i.e. get people to order products they don’t need), talk only […]
In a past appearance on CNBC’s On the Money, Tracy Coenen talked about how consumers could protect themselves from business opportunity scams and multi-level marketing (MLM) schemes. MLMs parade themselves around as business opportunities, but they are nothing more than […]
