Investigative Accountants To Find QC’s Money – 4 March 2013
04 Mar 2013As a high-flying London barrister starts a three-and-a-half year sentence for evading VAT over a twelve year period, investigative accountants must start the lengthy process of finding the cash he withheld from HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC). Rohan Pershad was deregistered for VAT in 2000 following a history of failure to submit tax returns and […]
Divorce Hot Spots – 1 March 2013
01 Mar 2013As the top ten hotspots for divorce in the UK are named, divorcing couples should ensure that they have the number of a good forensic accountant in case their current other half tries to hide any of the joint assets to which they are entitled. Unfortunately, with around 42 per cent of marriages in the […]
Forensic Accountants Find ‘Systemic Fraud’ – 25 February 2013
22 Feb 2013Three more people have been arrested over alleged fraud at welfare-to-work company A4e, highlighting the importance of forensic auditors, who first picked up on anomalies at the company in 2009 during a routine internal audit. The audit unearthed evidence of staff claiming for putting people into non-existent jobs, jobs that did not qualify for payment […]
Forensic Accounting Helps To Convict In Insurance Fraud – 22 Feb 2013
22 Feb 2013A claims management company has been shut down and two fraudsters jailed after a ‘crash for cash’ fraud ring was exposed through the work of the Metropolitan Police and painstaking backroom work on the criminals’ financial dealings. Last week company secretary of the firm and the ring’s mastermind, Andre Malagiac was sentenced to 12 months […]
Investigative Accounting Useful In Due Diligence – 4th February 2013
04 Feb 2013With the news that Caterpillar Chief Executive Doug Oberhelman has accepted blame for overpaying a key acquisition in China because of a “deliberate accounting misconduct”, it would be wise for businesses to remember to bring in the investigative accountants if conducting a due diligence exercise. If a company the size of Caterpillar, the world’s largest manufacturer of construction and mining equipment […]
Following Fraudsters’ Money – 28th January 2013
28 Jan 2013With fraud of some sort or another being in the news almost every day, forensic accountants are being thrust into the limelight, with an article on the practice being used in divorce settlements even making it into the London Evening Standard this week. This is because forensic accountants specialise in following the money trail and […]
Hiding Assets Won’t Work – 21st January 2013
21 Jan 2013A former property tycoon, who attempted to hide his £400m fortune in an attempt to prevent his wife getting a fair share of the assets after their divorce was jailed this week for his “deliberate” refusal to prove how he lost the money. Judge Mr Justice Moor jailed Scot Young for six months for “flagrant” contempt of court after […]
Forensic Investigation Uncovers Business Loans Corruption – 14th January 2013
14 Jan 2013Following a large-scale investigation into corruption, fraud and money laundering at a high street bank, which took over two years to come to fruition, Thames Valley police have charged eight people, including two former senior managers at HBOS. Allegations, which were reported under privilege in the House of Commons as long ago as June 2009, surfaced that a banker at […]
Olympus CEO Called In Forensic Accountants – 4th January 2013
04 Jan 2013The first CEO to turn whistleblower, Michael Woodford, last month published a book on how he eventually called in forensic accountants to get to the bottom of the fraud that threatened his livelihood, health and even at one stage, his life. Mr Woodford recalls in Exposure: Inside the Olympus Scandal: How I Went from CEO to Whistleblower, how he […]
Investigative Accountants Going Global – 14th December 2012
21 Dec 2012After As the investigation into wrongdoing over the rigging of the Libor rate continues, international regulators have now uncovered evidence leading to the arrest of two executives at broker RP Martin, while another brokerage has been asked to provide information to the investigators. The ever-widening investigation has led to more people being dragged into the regulatory net, […]
Investigative Accounting Brings About First Land Banking Convictions – 14th December 2012
14 Dec 2012After what has been described as a “complex and painstaking investigation” into the accounts, lifestyles and business practices of a couple of conmen, the UK’s first criminal convictions and prison sentences for a land banking fraud were secured last week. Omar Eshpari and Stefan Mitchell were sentenced to seven and six years respectively, having been […]
Proceeds of Crime Act Nets Millions – 7th December 2012
10 Dec 2012Thanks to the diligence of investigative accountants, West Yorkshire Police were able to reveal yesterday (November 6th 2012) that they have increased the amount of cash taken though the Proceeds of Crime Act (POCA) every year since 2007 and last year doubled the amount taken from convicted criminals from £5.6m in 2010/11 to £12.3m in […]
Unprosecuted mortgage fraud in criminal lifestyle confiscations
10 Dec 2012R v Waya – the UK Supreme Court judgment Written on 16 November 2012 by David Winch in 10 most popular this month, Case law, Confiscation, Fraud, Prosecutions. The Supreme Court judgment in the case of R v Waya in November 2012 may prove to be of profound significance in confiscation cases. This article discusses […]
Placing a Value on Free Time in Loss of Earnings Cases
10 Dec 2012Consider a self-employed consultant who claims compensation for loss of earnings as a result of a personal injury. Suppose that the Claimant earned £30k pa before the accident and but has earned only £15k after the accident, as evidenced by accounting records. On the face of it, the Claimant has a claim for loss of […]
Picture Your Forensic Accountant in the Hot-Tub….
10 Dec 2012…And Ask Yourself How You Feel About the Mental Image You Have Conjured Up. It seems likely that the giving of concurrent evidence by expert witnesses, so-called ‘Hot-tubbing’ is likely to become ever more common, not least because the experience of the courts is that it saves considerable judicial time and, as the Ministry of […]
The Chimera on The Springboard
10 Dec 2012Moylan J described the ostensible accuracy of private company valuations as being no more than a chimera whose purpose was to assist the court “in testing the fairness of the proposed outcome”. His view is shared by many judges and even the most robust forensic accountant would undoubtedly accept that the exercise of valuing shares […]
Litigation Support For Business
10 Dec 2012Forensic accounts are often associated with fraud, recovery of assets and finding cash in overseas accounts in criminal cases or locating where spouses have hidden assets in the divorce proceedings of the wealthy. But they are just as vital in scrutinising accounts when a business underperforms or fails. In these situations, there are often issues […]
Rogue Trader Brought Down By Investigative Accounting
10 Dec 2012The recent jailing of former UBS trader Kweku Adoboli for what the police describe as the UK’s biggest ever fraud, is in part due to the internal investigation launched in the summer of 2011 and headed by a forensic accountant. The accountant began his investigations but had his work cut out, as, having started in […]
Investigative Accounting Aids Insurers Beat Cash For Crash Scams
10 Dec 2012The Insurance Fraud Bureau’s (IFB) statistics from earlier this month reveal that undetected general insurance claims fraud total £2.1bn a year, adding on average £50 to the annual costs individual policyholders face, each year. Following an investigation carried out by Northumbria Police, with the help of the IFB’s highly-sophisticated counter-fraud software, three men and two […]
Confiscation – available amount
08 Nov 2012This article by David Winch article considers what is meant by a defendant’s ‘available amount’ and explains some of the rules the court must follow in determining the ‘available amount’. In confiscation proceedings against a convicted defendant the Crown Court will ordinarily have to separately determine two figures – the ‘benefit’ obtained by the defendant and his […]
The Money Laundering (Amendment) Regulations 2012 by David Winch
08 Nov 2012Amendments to the Money Laundering Regulations 2007 came into force on 1 October 2012, but what effect will these have on practitioners? The answer in most cases is likely to be ‘little or none’. It is now five years since the Money Laundering Regulations 2007 were introduced. HM Treasury believe that the regulations should be reviewed and […]
Money laundering – entering into an arrangement – s328 PoCA 2002 by David Winch
01 Oct 2012Prosecutors are sometimes tempted, unwisely, to strain the meaning of statutory provisions in order to charge a defendant. There have been a couple of successful appeals recently against money laundering convictions unders328 Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 where a defendant has been charged with “entering into or becoming concerned in an arrangement which he knows or […]
Forensic accountant for the high jump in charity bid
02 Aug 2012One NIFA member is aiming high in a bid to raise money to help adults with acquired brain injury. Forensic accountant, Roger Isaacs, is set to take one small step for him and one giant leap for the charity, Headway Somerset. Announcing his sponsored parachute jump, Mr Isaacs said he was ‘far too unfit to […]
Local authority to use Proceeds of Crime Act to crack down on rogue landlords
02 Aug 2012A London local authority is to crack down on rogue landlords using a law normally seen in fraud cases involving forensic accountancy expert evidence. Newham Council is to apply the Proceeds of Crime Act, originally aimed at stripping drug dealers of their ill-gotten gains, to seize money from people who charge desperate tenants a fortune […]
The use of experts, including forensic accountants, is to be cut back in Family Court
31 Jul 2012The use of experts in Family Court, to include forensic accountants, is to be curbed under new UK Justice Ministry proposals. As a report by Mr Justice Ryder on the operation of child proceedings is published, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge, warns that too many experts are being wastefully used, particularly in child proceedings. […]