The Netherlands: A Warm Investment Climate

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The Netherlands: A Warm Investment Climate

Amid the approval of the post-Covid-19 recovery plan, frugal Netherlands was the loudest voice in the European Council against the EUR 750 billion recovery plan to aid the worst affected countries. The Tax Justice Network reported that, in 2019, the European Union lost USD 10 billion in corporate tax to the Netherlands. But besides its stable political and economic environment, what makes the land of tulips and windmills so attractive to corporate giants such as Starbucks, Google and Amazon?

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A Call For Effective Counter-Fraud Measures: British government fails on surging pandemic fraud

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A Call For Effective Counter-Fraud Measures: British government fails on surging pandemic fraud

There is a ticking time-bomb of Covid-related fraud across the U.K.

Matters have come to a head following a report from an influential cross-party parliamentary committee, which has said that the U.K.’s Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has lost control of the country’s major form of social security payment — Universal Credit. This comes after new figures showed billions of pounds were lost to scams during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic.

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Fraud Talk: The $200,000 Car – When Fraudsters Use Audit Guidelines to Steal

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Fraud Talk: The $200,000 Car – When Fraudsters Use Audit Guidelines to Steal

In this episode of the ACFE’s monthly podcast Fraud Talk, the president and co-founder of Verracy, Mary Breslin, CFE, discusses a case she investigated where an employee stole $1.8 million after being overly interested in auditing processes. After being tipped off when she saw he purchased an expensive sports car, she shares lessons she learned from the case.

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Case Study: Organization Creates Bogus Inventory to Secure Loans

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Case Study: Organization Creates Bogus Inventory to Secure Loans

A few years ago, I worked a bogus inventory case. The organization in question had various branches across the country. The accounting books for all of these branches were centrally maintained at the organization’s headquarters. To organize their books by branch, they created a corresponding profit center in the accounting software. So for Branch X, organization created Profit Center X.

While finalizing the end-of-year accounts, an auditor identified that the organization had only five physical branches, but six profit centers existed in the accounting software. This didn’t seem right to the auditor, so he dug deeper, looking for the reason why there was a difference in the number of profit centers versus the actual branches.

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What We Can Learn From a $5 Million-Dollar Agricultural Cooperative Fraud

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What We Can Learn From a $5 Million-Dollar Agricultural Cooperative Fraud

One of my colleagues from the Agri-Business department of the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, knowing my interest in fraud examination, forwarded me an article about a $5 million-dollar fraud that occurred at a Minnesota agricultural cooperative. Published in the online magazine Successful Farming, author Laurie Bedord does a fine job outlining how coop manager, Jerry Hennessey, carried out the crime that lasted over the last 15 years, his motivation for the crime as well as what systems of internal control where lacking that allowed the fraud to be committed in the first place.

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