Auditors Have A Great Responsibility

Oh my! Gene Morse was stunned. He stared at the computer screen in

his cubicle, unable to believe that he had found an unsupported entry for
$500 million in computer acquisitions. He immediately took his discovery
to his supervisor, Cynthia Cooper, vice president for internal audit at
WorldCom. Keep going, directed Cooper. Her team of internal auditors
kept digging. They worked late into the night to avoid detection, concerned
that they would be fired if superiors found out what they were doing. They
burned data onto CDs because they feared the data might be destroyed.
Major frauds often begin at the top, and such was the case at WorldCom.
Bernie Ebbers, WorldComs founder and CEO, had told Cooper not to use
the term internal controls claiming that he did not understand it.
However, Cooper fought for respect and more resources for the internal
audit department. She told Ebbers that her division could save millions
of dollars of wasteful operations with internal controls. In the years that
followed, we paid for ourselves many times over said Cooper.
As she pursued the trail of fraud, Cooper was obstructed at every turn.
In late May 2002, Coopers team found a gaping hole in the books. The
company had recorded billions of dollars of regular fees paid to local
telephone companies as capital assets. This accounting trick allowed the company
to turn a $662 million loss into a
$2.4 billion profit in 2001. The companys CFO, Scott Sullivan, called her to his office
and asked her what they were up
to. He then asked her to delay her investigation to the following quarter, but she
refused. In June 2002, the company
announced that it had inflated assets by $3.8 billion, the largest accounting fraud in
history. When the investigation
was complete, the total amount of the fraud had grown to an astonishing $11
billion.
Sources: Adapted from 1. Amanda Ripley, The Night Detective, Time (December
30, 2002); 2. Susan Pulliam and Deborah Solomon,

Uncooking the Books: How Three Unlikely Sleuths Discovered Fraud at WorldCom,
The Wall Street Journal (October 30, 2002) p. A1.
Each chapters opening story illustrates important auditing principles based on
realistic situations. Some of these stories are
based on public information about the audits of real companies, whereas others are
fictitious. Any resemblance in the latter
stories to real firms, companies, or individuals is unintended and purely
coincidental.