Former KPMG audit Partner Scott I. London brought great shame to the accounting profession this week by being charged with conspiracy to commit securities fraud through insider trading. After nearly 30 years with KPMG, London went down in flames after being caught passing insider information on audit clients of the Los Angeles office to his “friend,” Bryan Shaw.

Proving once again that there is no honor among thieves, Shaw got caught first, and then sold out his friend Scott to the Feds.  He helped them get a gorgeous trail of evidence, including phone calls and photographs of the crime.  Both are now charged with insider trading.

Anyone who is being honest will tell you that financial statement audits don’t find fraud. On the rare occasion they do, but by and large audits are not designed to detect fraud and the auditors don’t have enough fraud detection training.

One solution to this problem is the engagement of forensic accountants to look for fraud. But companies don’t seem to interested in going the extra step.

Today Hewlett-Packard announced that an internal investigation revealed accounting fraud by Autonomy, a company that was acquired by HP last year for more than $10 billion. More specifically, the company said:

In the last week Big Four auditing firm PricewaterhouseCoopers has been sued over its performance of audits of companies with massive frauds. First, PwC was named as a defendant in a suit filed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation as the receiver for Colonial Bank.

Colonial Bank went under thanks to a fraud by Taylor Bean & Whittaker Mortgage Corp., its largest mortgage banking customer. Executives at Taylor Bean & Whitaker cooked up a scheme whereby they sold $400 million in worthless mortgages to Colonial Bank. The mortgages were worthless because they either did not exist, or had already been sold to other investors.

One year after MF Global “misplaced” $1.6 billion in customer funds, those funds still haven’t been recovered for investors. The money has allegedly been found, but that still doesn’t help customers who would like to get their misappropriated funds back.

Francine McKenna, a contributor at Forbes, notes there is another party that still hasn’t been held accountable in the MF Global debacle: auditors PricewaterhouseCoopers. She says:

The global audit firm would rather come off as stupid than complicit in the actions of whomever broke the law and stole MF Global customer funds.

In the current issue of Forbes magazine, accounting watchdog Francine McKenna has written an article about the SEC’s failure to take a hard line on accounting fraud in public companies. Despite all of the high profile accounting frauds uncovered in the past decade, the Securities & Exchange Commission appears to be focusing its efforts on going after Ponzi schemes rather than accounting fraud. Francine reports that of the 735 enforcement actions brought by the SEC in 2011, only 89 were related to fraudulent or misleading accounting and disclosures by public companies.

Some people say that Sarbanes Oxley has been doing its job relative to increasing prevention and detection of accounting fraud, but evidence of that is almost non-existent.  Auditors would have the public believe that auditors are being more effective in finding and reporting fraud, but the evidence does not back this up.

This was left as a comment to an article here, but I didn’t want it to get lost in the shuffle. It gives good insight on becoming a partner at a Big Four firm.

I joined PwC as a director, with explicit expectations that I’d have a leadership role building a new consulting practice. Along with that, I was told I could make a run at partner if my sales numbers were good. Even when the leadership role and the new practice never materialized, I had great numbers and terrific reviews.

After over a year of solid performance and high praise, I found out only by chance that the partnership isn’t an option for me because of my age. Of course this came as a shock. When I asked about my only other option for advancement, the Managing Director role, a partner told me it has similar revenue targets as the partnership but with greater risks.

There’s a good chance fraud may be occurring under your nose. How to get better at preventing it from happening on your watch.

Tracy L. Coenen – CFO Magazine

Internal fraud is a huge risk to companies. Experts estimate that on average it costs companies 3% to 5% of revenue each year. Especially when profit margins are thin, internal fraud can literally put some companies out of business.

But executives are prone to underestimating the amount of fraud that exists within their company. They want to believe that their internal controls are better, their employees are more honest, and their ability to stop fraud is more effective than that of executives at other companies.

Two weeks ago, I wrote a short piece on the possibility of PCAOB requiring public companies to rotate auditors on a regular basis. Today’s article delves more deeply into the topic, and more clearly lays out the reasons why it won’t work…. and this time I even included independent statistics.

This article was written for an organization that invited me to write about fraud for one of their monthly e-newsletters for corporate finance professionals. The article was rejected because it appeared to criticize the organization and the audit process. Apparently, offering ideas on what might be wrong with audits or how to improve audits is not allowed. Thus, I am publishing the article here.

On Friday, the market eagerly awaited the release of Groupon’s (GRPN)10-K, detailing results for the year ended December 31, 2011. Shares were up 3.84% during regular trading hours, but dropped as much as 8% (eventually settling at -5.93%) in after hours trading when the company announced its figures were not as good as reported in February.

Revised Numbers

Some news sites are billing this as a restatement, although it would appear to be more of a revision to the numbers, as the original numbers were simply cited in an earnings release and the financial statements weren’t actually issued until Friday.

Companies and organizations that are hit with employee fraud, including embezzlement, asset misappropriation, and financial statement manipulation are often surprised that the incident occurred. Even more surprising to executives and boards of directors is the fact that their auditors didn’t find the fraud sooner, or didn’t find it at all. After all, isn’t that what auditors are supposed to do?

In one case, the bookkeeper for a non-profit organization was stealing for several years and cleverly covering her tracks. She didn’t let the checks get too large, and she divided the check amounts between many accounts so that the entries in each account would be very small. She knew that if the amounts were small enough, they probably would not be carefully examined during the annual audits.