I have long believed that the nonsense the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) makes us go through at the airport does not actually makes us safer. It makes people feel safer, but it doesn’t actually make us safer.

And here is the proof. The stupid full body scanners that let TSA agents see us nude are easy to get past with all sorts of metal. One simple experiment shows how any properly motivated idiot can take all sorts of metal objects (weapons!) through airports and onto planes.

It might be hard to believe, but each and every day companies are losing money because they not only give employees opportunities to steal, they encourage it.

How? By not providing adequate oversight. A clerk, for example, sees that an error in an account wasn’t caught by anyone. A purchasing manager notices that no one is watching over his vendor relationships, and won’t know it if he establishes a fake account. Employees are not stupid. They know when they are being monitored and when their work is being checked. They know when they are working in an environment ripe for fraud.

A competent expert witness is vital to cases involving economic damages and other financial calculations. However, the expert must be much more than just a mathematician, market analyst, economic guru or forensic accountant. The job of the expert is far from over once the facts are analyzed and the calculations are completed.

Traditional accounting and finance skills are not enough when it comes to litigation. A financial expert witness must qualify as an expert in court and must convey the findings to non-accountants on paper and on the witness stand.

Today the Journal Sentinel ran a story about the fraud perpetrated on Milwaukee Area Technical College (and taxpayers) by Kristin Semits, the procurement director. Seimits is accused of stealing more than $259,000j over a 7 year period using her P-card (purchasing card – like a company credit card).

The report produced by Titus, the company that investigated the fraud, can be seen here. A graph on page 2 shows how the theft started out small (a few thousand dollars each year) and built up to $86,000 in 2011 alone. MATC’s budget is $260 million, so it’s easy to see how a theft of $50,000 or $80,000 in one year might have flown under the radar.

Paul Falk and Bradley Arnold of Falk Metz LLC were recently published in Subrogator Magazine, contributing an article titled How to Make Jurors Care About a Property Insurer’s Case. It’s an insightful article on the difficulty of making a juror relate to the plight of an insurance company, which is often seen as the profitable bad guy only looking out for its own interests.

Right or wrong, insurance companies are seen as huge corporations which will survive no matter the outcome of a jury trial. An individual or smaller company seeking to avoid reimbursing an insurance company may not survive, so easily, however. It is much easier for the juror to identify with the little guy.

Today the Wall Street Journal had a piece about the Texas Supreme Court considering whether to allow people to use fill-in-the-blank forms for divorces, potentially saving them a lot of money in legal fees. It is possible to handle your divorce pro se, but there is a concern that people are doing so to their own detriment.  In an effort to help do-it-yourself divorcees, 36 states currently have fill-in-the-blank forms for divorce.

It is simple to find forms to use in your divorce, but some attorneys say that this is a problem because divorcing couples don’t use the right forms, become a burden on the courts when they require hand-holding, and can make uninformed decisions during the process of the divorce.

Guest post by Michael Volkov, Esq.

The Department of Justice is proud of its record on FCPA enforcement. They take credit whenever and wherever they can. They trumpet every settlement. They proudly proclaim that over half of last year’s criminal fines were collected for FCPA violations. They are entitled to claim success.

It is hard to argue against prosecutions of private companies and individuals who engage in foreign bribery. Such conduct skews competition in the global marketplace, undermines the integrity of foreign governments and threatens to destabilize governments. These harms are more than evident – they are inescapable and persuasive. Our national interest supports reducing foreign bribery to protect the integrity of the global economy and foreign governments.

It’s hard to believe that a Ponzi scheme as massive as the one perpetrated by Bernard Madoff got by anyone. Surely he was the most clever criminal alive, and was ingenious at hiding his fraud. There couldn’t have been any signs of the scam he was running. Or were there?

It turns out there were plenty of red flags pointing squarely at the scheme Madoff was running. It was clear years ago to Harry Markopolos, the author of “No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller.”Markopolos was the whistleblower who went to the Securities and Exchange Commission on several occasions with his suspicions about Bernie Madoff. But he wasn’t an investment expert who was “just jealous” of Madoff’s apparent success in generating high earnings for his clients quarter after quarter. He was a numbers wizard who had concrete proof the Madoff’s “investment strategy” couldn’t be anything like what he (or others) said it was.

Executives have the means to commit and cover up the largest frauds.

They have access to the information and computer systems, they have power over all employees and they have access to the money. The finance function is riddled with fraud risks and the company’s executives are in the best position to take advantage of those risks.

Because of the risk of losing large sums of money to fraud by executives, companies must ensure owners and boards of directors are actively involved in creating and maintaining an environment that is not conducive to fraud. This involves active oversight of daily operations, continuous monitoring of potential red flags of fraud and swift action when fraud is discovered.

We hear almost daily reports of companies engaging in accounting shenanigans to boost their apparent performance. As of late, companies like Diamond Foods (DMND), Green Mountain Coffee Roasters (GMCR) and Avon Products Inc. (AVP) are grabbing headlines for their alleged bad behavior.

Avon has been under the shadow of bribery allegations, in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), since at least 2008. The company has spent hundreds of millions of dollars conducting internal investigations, has lost at least four executives linked to bribery in China, and has been suffering from poor financial performance. And now it appears that Avon may have been aware of bribes being paid as far back as 2005, meaning the company’s problems may soon get even worse.