Accounting: David Miller 1. David Miller is not unique in that he fits the profile of most white collar criminals.

White collar criminals look like everyone else in the business world, some are well liked and they seem to be ideal employees. They work long hours and never take vacation but they are most likely working on the constant struggle to conceal their fraud. It is for these reasons that it made Mr. Miller hard to detect. His employers thought he was putting in the extra mile when he would work long hours and he was said to do outstanding work. Most of this was most likely a ploy to cover his tracks. This coupled with Mr. Miller being a very likeable person proved to make his transgressions very hard for his employers to detect. 2. Mr. Miller committed the various fraud schemes by stealing money from his employers through forged checks. In order to forge the checks, Mr. Miller himself would sign the checks or he would trick colleagues into signing their names to checks requiring two authorizing signatures. He would do this by asking them to sign the checks just in case the company needed to authorize a payment while they were on vacation. In order to conceal the fraud, Mr. Miller would retrieve the canceled checks from the bank reconciliation and destroy the canceled checks he used to siphon money. The amount stolen was charged to a business units expense account in order to balance the companys books. Since Mr. Miller was stealing the money through forges checks, he would simply deposit the checks into his personal account to convert the funds into personal gain. With the stolen money Mr. Miller spent the money on everything from vacation homes to custom tailored suits. 3. Mr. Miller faced different personal pressures that allowed him to rationalize committing the various fraud schemes. The two most obvious pressures were Mr. Millers debts he owed previous employers for past frauds he committed and Mr. Millers appetite for extravagant living. The latter was most likely the genesis of Mr. Millers entire problem. Mr. Miller thought that having money would make him more likable. Ironically everyone seemed to like Mr. Miller and it probably had little to do with his material possessions. Unfortunately for Mr. Miller those material possessions are what he believed people liked him for and in order to afford them he had to commit fraud. After committing the various fraud schemes Mr. Miller was caught and in order for him not to go to jail he promised he would he repay his employers. Mr. Millers desire to live extravagantly never changed and his debts to his employers grew, so inevitably he continued to commit fraud. The pressures Mr.

Miller had to continue maintaining his lifestyle manifested themselves into rationalizations to commit the fraud. He probably thought that without the money he was stealing he could not succeed in life. After he was caught committing the frauds he had to repay the money he had previously stolen. He probably continued to rationalize the frauds by telling himself, he needed the money in order to keep himself out of jail. In this case and as in most other cases frauds begin with personal pressures and those pressures manifest themselves into rationalizations as to why they must commit the fraud. 4. Mr. Millers T-shirt that proclaimed, He who dies with the most toys wins, is an obvious red flag and it speaks volumes about Mr. Millers character. Someone that believes these kinds of statements is most likely is a person who is selfish and self centered. A person with these kinds of personality traits should worry companies because it is people like this that might steal from the company. Not that every selfish person will go as far as stealing thousands, even millions of dollars but people of this nature feel that they are entitled to things and will do whatever it takes in order to get it. Traits like these are found in many business people, and many times found in top executives, unfortunately traits like these help people get to the top. Never the less, companies should keep a watchful eye on these individuals because it is these types of people that may put pressure on themselves to live a certain lifestyle and those pressures may later manifest themselves in a rationalization to commit fraud because they feel they cannot get what they want legally. 5. Companies may be hesitant to prosecute white collar criminals for a variety of reasons. First off they may be hesitant because they fear the public perception of the company after fraud has been uncovered. They might fear that if a white collar crime perpetrated against them, the public and investors may question the integrity of the company. This fear may not be completely unfounded because if a major fraud were to become public, a companys stock price would most likely plummet. Companies may justify that absorbing the loss of the actual fraud will be less than the one they would have to absorb in the ensuing public relations nightmare. Most of the time the fraud is committed by someone in the company and inevitably someone in the company that management knows. This person may be a very well liked and they might have a family. The company may feel that it would be too much for the family to barer and avoid prosecution for the sake of the family. This does nothing to fix the wider problem of white collar crime because there is no deterrent. Potential white collar criminals see no examples of harsh penalties for

people that commit fraud and if they do, they are very sporadic and mostly for frauds with major national impacts. It is important that all frauds are convicted because there needs to be examples made so that others see the penalties. It is also important to convict fraudsters because the aggregated effect of all of the smaller frauds probably cost the country billions of dollars in lost revenue. It would be difficult for the Justice Department to do much to encourage companies into prosecuting their white collar criminals because many of the fears companies have about prosecuting white collar criminals are not unfounded. The public perception of companies that prosecute white collar criminals is what needs to change. The public needs to understand that companies that go after these kinds of people will not stand for such acts and should appreciate the stand they take. 6. Segregation of duties would have helped every one of Mr. Millers employers. It seems that in every case Mr. Miller had the authorization, custody, and record functions for all of his positions. With proper segregation of duties, Mr. Miller would have had a much more difficult time conducting the fraud because it would have been impossible for him to have custody of the checks, authorize payments, intercept the bank statement and record the payments as expenses to various business units. The companies could have also implemented mandatory vacations and rotation of duties. With the implementation of mandatory vacations and rotation of duties, Mr. Millers fraud scheme would have been much easier to detect.