“Yes, sir.” I locked my computer and headed over to his office.
“Close the door, please.” He took a seat behind his desk.
“I promise I haven’t applied for any new jobs.” I tried to force a smile.
Not yet, but this may be my last day here, even if I don’t have a job lined up.
“I’m glad to hear that—because we just lost Paul.” He sighed and shook his head.
Oh shit.
“What happened to him?” My eyes opened wide in shock.
“Some stuff is going on and I need your help.” He leaned forward. “Please don’t ask me a lot of questions, I just need you to do what I ask.”
“Okay…” I swallowed nervously.
“I need you to review all of the accounts that Dana and Paul were working on. I’m afraid they may have been working together on something that could put the company in serious jeopardy.” Mr. Smith sighed and tapped his fingers on the desk. “We need to do a full review of every single account, and this isn’t just coming from me—Mr. Dunkirk personally requested that you head up this review.”
“Me?” I blinked in surprise. “Why?”
“You’re new here and you’re not from Atlanta. He believed you’ll look at everything objectively since you don’t really know many people in the office. We don’t know how widespread this is, but we need to keep a lid on it until we fully understand what we’re dealing with.” He shook his head back and forth. “I’m sure you understand the implications—even if I’m not being completely clear.”
“I do—but wouldn’t an auditor normally handle something like this? I mean, this is an actual investigation, right?” I tilted my head to the side.
“Remember what I said about not asking questions?” He tilted his head to the side. “This is the part where you just agree to do what I’m asking and report back to me with everything you find.”
“I’m happy to help…” My words trailed off.
“Good, I need you to get started immediately and I need a report by tomorrow morning.” Mr. Smith nodded quickly.
“Tomorrow morning?” My eyebrows shot up and my jaw fell open. “There’s no way I can review all of those accounts before the end of the day.”
“I know. You might have to work straight through the night, but trust me—this can’t wait.” He shook his head back and forth again. “We need to find the problem and fix it. We’ll report it and make sure the SEC is on board with every decision we make, but it’ll look a lot better if we bring it to them first.”
“Yes sir, I understand.” I nodded and started to stand. “I’ll get started immediately.”
I walked out of
Mr. Smith’s office with my head spinning—I was even more confused than before. If Dana and Paul were working together, why would they bring me into it? That didn’t make any sense. If Dana and Paul were bribed, Mr. Dunkirk wouldn’t be asking me to audit the accounts—unless they had been corrected. Did they know Dana and Paul confided in me? Were they having me audit the accounts so that I would be forced to testify that they were correct when I looked at them to nullify me as a witness against the company? I wanted to believe Mr. Smith and I wanted to believe that Dunkirk Accounting was a good company. The entire situation just felt wrong—especially with Dana and Paul ignoring my attempts to get in touch with them.
I guess I don’t have a choice. Looking at the accounts will at least tell me if they’ve been corrected or not.
I unlocked my computers and found a link from Mr. Smith in my email that gave me access to the folders where Dana and Paul kept their accounts. It gave the authority to view them, but I couldn’t make any edits. That gave me a little bit of relief since there was no way I could be accused of doing anything to them while I completed my review. I started with the first account in Dana’s folder and didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. The second one was the exact same way. I knew which one should be messed up though, so I just moved through them until I found the Russo account. I was nervous when I pulled it up because it was going to reveal everything. I scanned the lines of numbers quickly, highlighting each cell as I moved through the spreadsheet. Everything was perfect and all of the formulas she showed me had been removed.
Okay, well that tells me what I need to know. They fixed it.
After the corrections had been made, the Russo account was making a lot more money than what was shown before. That was sure to raise some red flags when they had to submit corrections on their tax returns. If they weren’t aware that the accounts were being tampered with, then they were definitely going to freak out when they saw the changes. I decided to just skip over to Paul’s folder and find the shipping company. The Russo account was enough to set alarm bells off, but if the shipping company had been adjusted as well, then I was going to be in the middle of a full-blown conspiracy. I loaded the spreadsheet and started scanning, quickly finding that it was exactly like the Russo account. Everything Paul showed me was gone, and the account was making a lot more money than it was the previous day.
This is really bad.
I took an early lunch even though I wasn’t hungry and contemplated what I should do next. If those two accounts were correct, then any other issues that may have existed would likely be fixed as well. I was auditing something that had already been fixed, and they knew my report would reflect that the accounts were perfect. I was stuck. I could very well be the last person at the company besides the members of management who corrected the accounts that knew there was an issue, to begin with. I began to worry that Dana and Paul had actually been paid off and decided to sacrifice their integrity for profit. I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t give Mr. Smith a report that said the accounts were perfectly fine when I knew they weren’t always that way. It was going to fall on me to report the issue to the SEC.
I need to see if I can find any hard evidence—anything that can confirm what Dana and Paul showed me.
Later that afternoon
I thought about all the classes I took in college as I sat at my desk and scanned through the accounts. They taught us about companies like Enron as a precautionary measure, but it was meant to be a history lesson. It wasn’t meant to be real life. There were new regulations and auditing requirements that were supposed to prevent that kind of stuff from happening again. I would have never believed it was possible unless I had seen it with my own eyes. The scope had to be wide. Someone at the company had to be involved, possibly someone as high up as Mr. Dunkirk himself, and the customers had to know what was going on if the accounts were so easily corrected. The customers were possibly even paying him to do what was commonly referred to as cooking the books. It was a lot fancier than normal fraud but it was still a way to embezzle money without paying taxes on it.