Week 6 Assignment
Keller Graduate School of Management
2/14/2016

Fashioning A Fraud Case Study

Expense reports are a fact of life for any business that sends employees to visit clients other offices, or conferences. While most employees are honest and abide by corporate rules, there are enough dishonest ones to make a serious dent in the bottom line. In the “Fashioning A Fraud Case”, Bobbie Jean Donnelly defrauded her company of approximately $275,000 over a two year time span, by submitting travel and expense reimbursements. She committed this fraud by using several different expense reimbursement schemes. There are four methods of reimbursement schemes; mischaracterized expense reimbursements, overstated expense reimbursements, fictitious expense reimbursements, and multiple reimbursements. In this case schemes such as multiple reimbursements, mischaracterized expense reimbursements, and fictitious reimbursements were present.
Donnelly and four other employees from her department submitted expenses multiple times for reimbursement. They would submit American Express bills for reimbursement instead of submitting detailed receipts of individual expenses. Further review showed that employees were submitting the same expenses twice by submitting one month of charges, then submitting the subsequent month with the old charges and new charges combined with late fees. Throughout the investigation auditors also discovered that employees were submitting the same receipt multiple times but altered the size of the tip and total amount on each of the documents. In addition they found multiple taxi receipts that had sequential trip numbers on the same day from the same taxi. It appears that these expenses were fictitious because the numbers were altered, and the receipts had sequential trip numbers on the same day from the same taxi. The employees performed steps from