In July, critics attacked Groupon (GRPN) and it use of a made-up accounting measure management called Adjusted CSOI. I suggested that the company made up the measure to exclude many of the company’s expenses to make the company look more successful.

There was more to the story, however, as the Grumpy Old Accountants revealed Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) violations in reporting revenue. Essentially, Groupon was recording more than twice the amount of revenue it should have been reporting under GAAP. The Grumpies explained:

Compliance professionals can talk at length about the importance of conducting internal investigations when there are whistleblower reports of fraud, corruption, and other questionable behavior. But what actually matters is doing something when the time comes. This case study  illustrates how one public company did it right to head off big trouble when the SEC came knocking.

A supervisory employee in the company’s accounting department was having performance problems. She was counseled repeatedly, and management decided that one final warning was in order. The employee had a “last chance” meeting with management, in which she was told that the next step would be termination if her she did not meet certain performance expectations.

Guest Post by Brian Mahany

Each year, the Treasury Department Inspector General for Tax Administration (”TIGTA”) audits the IRS to measure the agency’s performance. 2010 was not a great year for the Service or taxpayers.  The Inspector General concluded that,  ”During FY 2010, the IRS encountered many challenges, including a variety of tax provisions that were created, extended, or expanded.” There were over 100 new provisions alone just from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

To ease the burden of coming up to speed on these new laws, the IRS hired over 3000 new revenue agents, tax compliance officers and other personnel. Unfortunately, the private sector doesn’t have those same resources.

I was recently quoted in CFO Magazine for an article on creating an ethical culture within companies. Below are a few excerpts, including my comments.

In December, the federal government cited a “lax corporate control environment” at Alcatel, which extended right up to the CEO and CFO, as a primary cause of the scandal. It was a finding that more companies should take to heart.

Nearly a decade after the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and amid heightened FCPA enforcement, the responsibility for shaping what is often called a “culture of compliance” inside U.S. corporations falls heavily on the C-suite — and, more than ever, on the CFO.

As the United States goes back to normal, following our remembrance of September 11, 2001, one of the most offensive bits of “normal” continues at airports. We, the citizens of the United States, allow the Transportation Security Administration to shame, humiliate, and violate us every single day. (See a photo of the kind of thing I’m talking about here.)

Today I focus on one Thedala Magee, a TSA employee who violated Amy Alkon in an airport. What Thedala Magee did, as described by Alkon, is nothing short of sexual assault. But it was sanctioned and allowed by our government in the name of “safety” at airports.

You may have already heard the story about Thedala Magee’s lawyer, Vicki Roberts, sending a threatening letter to Amy Alkon, demanding $500,000 for publicly saying that Magee raped her.

The path from Marquette undergraduate to forensic accounting expert was an unexpected one for Tracy Coenen. But she hadn’t counted on a chance semester of Financial Criminal Investigations and the impression left by her professor, a former IRS special agent.

“It was somewhat accidental and somewhat not,” Coenen said. Her professor explained the intricacies of financial investigations and how these cases could be cracked using techniques of accounting, as opposed to street maneuvers. Intrigued by the class content, Coenen, then majoring in criminology and law studies, used all her elective credits to take business and accounting classes to carve out a niche for her newfound interest. “That’s what got me interested in it, and then I had to figure out how to get into the private sector.”