Strike Me Down - Mindy Mejia Page 0,1

and bigger rewards. It feeds them and can override many of their ingrained ethical checkpoints. Does every skydiving CEO commit financial statement fraud? Of course not. But your job, your ethical duty as CPAs, is to monitor the risk environment of your company and understand the elements of the fraud triangle.

“Opportunity. Pressure. Rationalization. This is the birthing ground of crime.”

A dozen people approached Nora afterward, asking follow-up questions or sharing their own war stories about corporate theft. Nora made the appropriate noises, handed out her firm’s business cards, and offered general, conservative guidance while the seminar handlers herded them into the hallway so they could set up the next presentation.

As the attendees dispersed, Nora glanced toward the opposite ballroom where a crowd still gathered around their presenter, a tall, lanky man who’d gravitated to the food table and was making short work of the remaining croissants. He chatted, laughed, and gestured with a coffee cup while the staff tried in vain to clear the buffet. When he spotted Nora watching him, arms crossed and one eyebrow raised, he winked.

“Excuse me.”

A tender pantsuit, who must have been hovering in the background, complimented the lecture before nervously clearing her throat and asking the question Nora had learned to expect since she’d started giving this talk five years ago.

“Did you feel responsible?” the girl asked. “For Sam White’s death?”

“I didn’t commit the fraud or put the gun in his mouth.” Nora thanked her and watched her leave.

“You didn’t answer her question.”

Corbett MacDermott stepped up beside her, brushing bits of croissant off his shirt. Nora ignored her partner’s pointed look. She didn’t have to answer the question, not for Corbett, because he already knew what she wouldn’t say.

“Let’s go.”

* * *

It was hard to watch a company collapse, run into sixty-year-olds working as cashiers because their pensions were worthless, and testify in trials that put your colleagues in prison, without feeling at least partially responsible. It was even harder when your boss had been your father’s best friend. For as long as Nora could remember, the Whites and the Triers had vacationed together. She’d spent summers babysitting Sam’s kids, beating one at tag and the other at chess. Later, Sam hired her right out of college as a junior accountant at Computech, constantly bragging that she was his big gun in the finance department.

When Nora uncovered the company’s scheme to inflate profits, she’d gone straight to Sam, assuming he would be as outraged as she had been to find the fraud. Instead, Sam gaslit her, telling her she didn’t understand complex accounting. Then he tried to bribe her with a higher salary, and finally he resorted to guilt: Nora wouldn’t ruin him, would she? Not after everything Sam had done for her.

“We’re family, Nora,” he said, reaching over the evidence she’d compiled and covering her hand with his perspiring one. “I need you to help protect our family now.”

Nora nodded, gathered her notes, and went to look up the number for the SEC. Less than a month later, Sam was dead.

After Computech collapsed, Sam’s wife had a breakdown. The kids Nora had once babysat started sending her hate mail. Even her own parents stopped talking to her. Nora got used to lying awake nights in bed, staring at the rotating blades of the ceiling fan. She inventoried the peas on her dinner plate, lined them up in neat rows of ten before scraping the food into the trash. She thought about moving away, but before she could decide where to go a different path presented itself.

An older man greeted Nora in the courthouse lobby as she left one of the trials. “I believe you’re out of a job, Ms. Trier.”

The card he handed her was thick and embossed. Jim Parrish, it read. Parrish Forensics.

“I’ve got a few irons in the fire.” She had three unreturned calls in to temp agencies and a head hunter who’d actually laughed in her face. Whistle-blowers might have legal protections under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, but no one wanted to hire someone who rocked the boat.

“Have you considered forensic accounting?”

Nora had never actually heard the term before, which in retrospect should have been embarrassing. She said something about CSI and swirling tubes of DNA at crime scenes, which made Jim chuckle.

“We stay away from bodily fluids, but the principle is the same. Fraud costs this great country of ours forty to fifty billion in direct, measurable dollars every year. Corporate boards, CFOs, and CEOs like yours who don’t care about