Mrs Smith’s greed and dishonesty have brought disaster to her family.”
According to the judgement passed down by the court the fraud began on June 3, 2005, two months after Mr Smith’s retirement, when Mrs Smith arranged for £29,252.60 to be paid from Glen Dimplex to the couple’s joint account at the St Helens branch of Natwest.
More than £2.1m was transferred into the couple’s joint account or their individual accounts over the next five years without suspicion being raised.
An extra £700,000 was paid directly from Glen Dimplex to Mrs Lewis’ Barclays bank account over the same period.
In the High Court hearing her 65-year-old husband claimed he had been “duped” and had no idea where the money was coming from.
Mr Smith said after the downsizing of their home and the subsequent release of equity and his pay-off and pension he thought they were “cash rich”.
Replies (3)
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This doesn't surprise me...
Albert Camus (of this site) and I undertake AP audits for large companies across the UK - we are talking household names downwards.
We perform some pretty basic accountancy (eg: supplier statement reconciliations, and contract compliance) and last year we (and our team) recovered over £60 million!!
£18m of this was for one company alone!
The auditors of this one comapny are a big four firm. They often come in and sit near us, but have never asked us anything about what we do and have never questioned where the (material) £18m comes from (I know roughly what their materiality is because I used to work for this big four firm and used to run the audit of the company we are at today)
In otherwords, their audit opinion is wrong and they have been presented evidence that it is wrong, but they have either never realised what they are looking at or don't care.
The fact that the auditors missed £2.8m over several years doesn't surprise me one little bit.
Steve
Quelle surprise
The meaningless of a large company audit is well established. I too used to work for a Big 4 firm and I can state from experience that there is absolutely no way you can audit a properly large company in the relatively few weeks over which an audit takes place. It does SOMETHING, it can give you more piece of mind than having an unaudited entity, but it's not a comprehensive review that covers every conceivable issue. Anyone who really thinks that is a bit out of touch with reality.
Its all about procedures!
Fraud of this type is not that difficult in companies this size, even on this scale. Due to the size of the company they feel, rightly or wrongly, that their must be a process and procedure in place for every action taken within the business. The problem occurs when a rogue employee uses those very procedures and processes to commit the fraud. In simple terms, if all the boxes are ticked in the correct manner then everything must be in order.........