The cases

The frauds forensic accountants actually find, one engagement at a time.

The case library follows the three branches of the occupational fraud tree that forensic accountants work from: assets taken, decisions bought, and numbers bent. Each case is a different company, a different scheme, and a different way of finding it.

We don't say which case holds which scheme. A case opens with what the client noticed, like a thin bank balance or a supplier that's suddenly winning everything. Working out what's behind it is the job.

Assets taken

Asset misappropriation

The most common fraud, and usually the smallest per case. Someone with access takes cash, writes a check, pads a paycheck, or walks inventory out the door, then hides it in the records.

SCHEMES IN THE LIBRARYWP C-1

Where the money leaves	Schemes you'll meet
Cash coming in	Skimming. Cash taken before it's ever recorded. Lapping. One customer's payment used to cover another's. Write-off concealment. Paid balances written off as bad debts. Fictitious refunds. Refunds to customers who don't exist.
Payments going out	Shell vendors. Invoices from vendors that exist only on paper. Pass-through schemes. A middleman marking up what a real supplier delivered. Split purchases. Purchases split to stay under an approval limit. Altered payees. Checks changed after they were signed. Payment diversion. A vendor's bank details quietly changed for a few payments.
Payroll	Ghost employees. Paychecks for people who don't work there. Falsified pay rates. Pay rates changed in the payroll system. Padded hours. Timecards edited to add overtime.
Expense claims	Duplicate reimbursement. Claiming costs the company already paid. Fictitious expenses. Claims for business that never happened.
Inventory and equipment	Inventory theft. Goods shipped out and written off as damaged. Unrecorded disposals. Equipment sold privately while it stays on the books.

Decisions bought

Corruption

An insider uses their influence over a purchase, a contract, or an approval for their own benefit, or someone else's. The books often look clean. The evidence sits in who won, at what price, and who is related to whom.

Undisclosed conflicts

Contracts steered to, or discounts given to, a business a decision-maker or their family quietly owns.

Gifts and kickbacks

A supplier treats a buyer well, and the buyer's orders, and the supplier's prices, follow.

Bid rigging

Bidders who look independent take turns winning and pad the price for each other.

Bribery and extortion

An official who controls an approval speeds it up for those who pay, and slows it down for those who don't.

Numbers bent

Financial statement fraud

Rarer, but the most expensive. Nobody pockets the cash directly. Management makes results look better than they are to hit a target, satisfy a lender, or earn a bonus.

SCHEMES IN THE LIBRARYWP C-2

What's distorted	Schemes you'll meet
Revenue	Channel stuffing. Next quarter's sales pulled into this one. Bill-and-hold abuse. Billing for goods that never left the warehouse. Round-tripping. Sales swapped back and forth with a friendly partner. Fictitious revenue. Sales to customers who don't exist.
Expenses and assets	Improper capitalization. Ordinary costs recorded as long-term assets. Cookie-jar reserves. Reserves built up in good quarters and released in bad ones. Overvalued assets. Obsolete inventory kept at full cost.
Liabilities and disclosures	Hidden liabilities. Obligations kept off the balance sheet ahead of a loan test. Omitted contingencies. A likely lawsuit loss left out of the statements and the notes.
Operating results	Manipulated operating data. Production reports adjusted to earn a bonus.

The expert capstone combines schemes from more than one branch, run by different people, and asks you to separate who did what.

The toolkit

What you'll practice

Reconciliation. Tie what should have come in to what was deposited, and what was booked to what physically exists.
Matching across records. Vendors against employees, payroll against HR, expense claims against card charges.
Vouching and tracing. Follow an entry back to its support, or a document forward to the books.
Analytics. Trends before and after a change, rates by person and hour, results clustered at a threshold or a target.

Cutoff and confirmation. Test what landed in the wrong period, and ask third parties what they actually did.
Ownership research. Use public business records to find out who is behind a company.
Quantifying the loss. Put a defensible number on what the scheme cost.
Ruling things out. Every case has innocent explanations that look suspicious. Clearing them is part of the work.

Difficulty

Difficulty tiers

Beginner

One scheme, a few records, and one comparison that breaks it open. A good first case for anyone new to forensic work.

Intermediate

More records, and something innocent that looks guilty. You'll combine two or three techniques to tell them apart.

Advanced

Longer trails through outside and public records, and questions that need real accounting judgment to answer.

Expert

Overlapping schemes in one company. You'll need to work out who did what, and who didn't know.

Your instructor chooses which cases you play and sets the hours budget for each.

Ready to open a case file?

Try a free case Join a class