How Much Do You Know about Protecting Personal and Corporate Information from Would-be Fraudsters? Find out what you know about how to analyze credit, what causes data breaches, what precautions to take when accessing hotspots in an airport with a laptop, current identity theft laws, and controlling physical access to restricted areas. ...

The Financial Professional's Guide to Healthcare Reform; Accountants' Handbook, 12th Edition New titles from Wiley this summer include Scott Miller on Buyouts, Dietrich and Anderson’s thorough Financial Professional’s Guide to Healthcare Reform, Roman Weil et al. on Litigation Services and the Financial Expert, and Graham and Carmichael’s Accountants' Handbook, 12th Edition.  ...

How to Arrive at an Appropriate Fair Market Price for a Medical Practice When valuing a medical practice, how do you determine fair market value in light of recent Stark II regulations? Some of it depends on the definition of the term “commercially reasonable.” And a lot also depends on accurate assessment of future revenues, as well as expense assumptions. Here’s a guide to what to keep an eye on as you na ...

An Unconventional Approach to Safeguarding Cash Billing schemes accounted for 23.9 percent of all payment-process fraud cases, and most of these cases go on for almost two years before they’re discovered. Here are two simple controls business owners can put in place to dramatically discourage fraud. The first is setting up a system for the owner to regularly review accounting statements each month at home.  ...

Tracy L. Coenan published a succinct guide to fraud analysis last year in the Wisconsin Law Journal that's very much worth reading.  Excerpt: ...

Psychology Of Fraud: Why Good People Do Bad Things NPR's Chana Joffe-Walt and Alix Spiegel have put together a fascinating podcast that examines the psychology of fraud. It often isn’t as easily explained as bad people doing bad things. Ethicists and psychologists have documented an unusually high number of people who start out, in their minds, doing the right thing. The story follows the case of Toby Grove ...

PwC Global Economic Crime Report: Cybercrime a Growing Threat  A new PwC report calls cybercrime one of the top four economic crimes – just after asset misappropriation, accounting fraud, and bribery/corruption, according to recent reporting in AccountingWeb.  What is cyber crime?  The PwC report, which you can read here, defines it this way: For our survey questionnaire, we defined cybercrime as: ‘an econo ...

Fraud and the Family Business: It’s Not So Unusual The dynamics of a family-owned business are like no other, writes Robert Rothbort at Accounting Today.   There's usually a great atmosphere of trust. But that can leave family businesses uniquely vulnerable to fraud.  Here are some common schemes: • “Ghost” employees. The family member overseeing payroll creates “ghost” employees that do not exist and arran ...

A Rogue Employee Might be On Your Payroll, Too So writes Sarah E. Needleman at the Wall Street Journal Law Blog, where she points out that small businesses tend to be more vulnerable to fraud than large firms: If a business as established and well off as UBS can suffer at the hands of one bad apple, could the same can be true for any business, even a small firm? According to various media reports, an allege ...

IT Guru Turns Out to Be Security Hole  Roger Kay reports at Forbes:  Small businesses have become a choice target for hackers, but by far the most common — and devastating — attacks on small businesses are inside jobs. This is the story of one such assault. The target (we’ll call him Peter) trusted his IT guy (Joe, for our purposes) because Joe worked magic.  Peter didn’t understand exactly what Joe was doi ...