Posts Tagged ‘fraud’
SEC Hits VMWare on Earnings Management
The Securities and Exchange Commission slapped software giant VMWare with accounting fraud charges Monday, accusing it of slow-rolling the delivery of software to customers so the company could prop up its order backlog and delay revenue recognition into future quarters. VMWare will pay $8 million to settle the charges, a paltry sum for a $10…
Read MoreFresh Lessons on Management Fraudsters
One of the largest PR firms in the world is going through its own minor PR crisis this week, with its former CFO pleading guilty to embezzling $16 million from the firm over the course of nearly a decade. Frank Okunak, who ran financial operations at PR firm Weber Shandwick from 2009 to 2019, pleaded…
Read MoreSEC Hits Software Firm on Accounting Fraud
The Securities and Exchange Commission has fined a New Jersey software firm $12.5 million for accounting fraud in the 2010s, in a case offering multiple lessons about poor management and internal control failures in the tricky world of software sales. The company in question is Synchronoss Technologies, which sells software to telecommunications firms. The SEC…
Read MoreModerna CFO Fired After First Day
Wild news in the Covid-19 world today: Vaccine maker Moderna has fired its new CFO one day into the job, after the executive’s previous employer disclosed in an SEC filing that it had launched an investigation into fraudulent financial reporting. Moderna disclosed the departure of Jorge Gomez in a terse press release issued Wednesday morning.…
Read MoreMiddling News on Anti-Fraud Efforts
The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners has a report out this week about which technologies companies are using to fight fraud, although one major theme is that plenty of companies still use traditional anti-fraud tactics — even as the nature of fraud risk is changing rapidly. Hmmm. ACFE’s 2022 Anti-Fraud Benchmarking Report polled more than…
Read MoreStudy: Whistleblower Awards Cut Fraud Risk
Compliance professionals have another neato academic study to start your week, this one finding that the whistleblower provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act reduce the risk of accounting fraud at publicly traded firms by as much as 22 percent. Measuring the effect of Dodd-Frank’s whistleblower provisions has long been tricky business, because the law went into…
Read MoreSEC Charges Taxi Lender With Fraud
The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged the head of a New York financial firm with fraud, saying he paid media consultants to write bogus stories and offered kickbacks to valuation firms, all to prop up a banking subsidiary that lent money to taxi drivers and held the cabbies’ medallions as collateral. The driver of…
Read MoreA Difficult Picture for Anti-Fraud Today
The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners is holding its 2021 conference this week (virtually), and to that end the ACFE also just published its latest survey on anti-fraud budgets, resources, and challenges. Suffice to say, anti-fraud and internal audit teams have had a busy year. More than half of all survey respondents said they’ve found…
Read MoreDigging Into the State Street Settlement
I haven’t had time to write about this until now, but last week State Street Corp. agreed to pay a $115 million criminal penalty and accept a compliance monitor for two years, to settle charges that the bank deliberately overcharged its clients for years. If you want an example of how invasive compliance monitorships can…
Read MoreSome Stats on Fraud Training
Looking for some benchmarking data for how you should structure your anti-fraud training program and what it should contain? Fear not, a new survey from the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners has you covered. The ACFE published its survey over the weekend, after polling more than 1,700 anti-fraud professionals around the world earlier this year.…
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