Seminars by Andy Pappas

Andy Pappas has informed and entertained attorney groups and other audiences with accounts of some of his more interesting forensic engagements. If you or your firm would benefit from a one-hour CLE presentation on forensic accounting and financial investigation, please contact Andy Pappas.

Following is an excerpt from an invitation to an Andy Pappas seminar, "The Hunt for Cooked Books":

“What the use of fingerprints was to the 19th century and DNA analysis was to the 20th, forensic accounting will be to the 21st century.” - Gordon Brown, Chancellor of the Exchequer, United Kingdom

If you think accounting isn’t exciting, you haven’t spent enough time with a forensic accountant (after all, it took a financial investigator to catch Al Capone). Forensic accounting covers two broad and critical areas – litigation support and investigative accounting – and it requires two qualities that most CPAs don’t have: the ability to think like someone with an evil mind and the ability to look for what is missing rather than just determining if what is there is correct. Instead of accepting financial records at their face value, forensic accountants approach every engagement with the presumption that something is wrong and someone is bad.

Why should you care? Because a financial thief can take a balance sheet, a set of account books, invoices, bills, and a checking account, juggle and manipulate the figures and – presto – millions become thousands, profits become losses, sales fall, whatever suits his purpose. And he might be the controller for one of your clients. Or maybe one of your clients has invested in an LLC and, instead of the expected high return, he receives unexpected capital calls or a much smaller-than-anticipated check when the assets are liquidated.