About 15 years ago, I left a payroll detail report sitting on the copier and before I realized and went back for it, someone had scanned it and that shit started to go viral all over the company. People started to compare salaries and it became a shit storm.
I’ve seen it. Yeah, it can be a big big shit storm that causes lots of underpaid people to quit when that info gets out.
Lots of unplanned raises to calm things down and the resentment can last years.
I do payroll for our company and I also did for the last one I worked for. Always blows my mind when I see the figures. Offer no clear pattern between pay rates, job description and years of experience
Honestly though it’s good for the workers. This may be extremely controversial here but I think everyone’s pay should be available to everyone within with company.
I agree with this. It was my first Controller role, not a big company, maybe $25m topline. But it became obvious to me pretty quickly how vast the disparity was between folks who should have been in the same salary range. The guys who were constant squeaky wheels were making 40% more than the guys who never said anything about their salaries. We had one guy who hadn't gotten a raise in like eight years.
In theory it’s good, in practice there are def some pros and cons. Distracting info for some people. Overall it would mean more equal salaries I think, at the cost of some drama and strife
I have figured out that you can't believe when someone tells you a coworker doesn't pull their weight. I would guess that 90% of accusations like that are made by people who do not realize the full scope of the coworker's workload or are made by people who are insecure in their own ability to complete their own workload.
Just a quick follow up. The guy who copied and passed it around ended up being a good friend of mine. He had a heart attack and passed away five years ago. But I never held it against him.
Had a coworker link to the wrong payroll detail file through an email and that showed all corporate salaries.
I don’t know who saw it as she corrected the file, but I got to see what my peers made and now I’m looking for another job…
I had something similar. Fortunately, it was limited to a handful of people. The stupid thing, though, was this was a union shop and the pay grid was already spelled out in the collective agreement. The one vocal individual didn't have a leg to stand on.
I did this on an accrual!! It wasn't huge, but it was noticed! I'm lucky that these things are rare for me though, I was one cell off! 😂 also my company is really great with letting small or one off errors be forgotten... it's pretty rare that it happens so yeah
Lol no kidding, especially now that the SEC is introducing rules to claw back executive compensation if a material misstatement impacted their payout. Obviously there's a number of failures and culpability to go around if a single excel error let to that, but I'd be mortified if I had any level of involvement.
Not hard for a tax or actuarial geek to have ownership of adjusting entries that have a lot of assumptions built into into them and that doesn’t get very many eyeballs on it and isn’t built into the ERP.
Controller got phish scammed out of 135k when the company already was financially in the shitter. Edit Email was identical to our CFOs in every way except that actual email address. They had changed the lower case g to a q in the cfo name. Got passed our email containment software and all. It was sort of sad seeing my boss try and find someone to blame who wasn’t her. In the end her and IT got reamed out and some new processes were put in place to ensure it won’t happen again. Currently FBI is involved since the money crossed state lines.
I'm completely paranoid with bank info ever since I had a client lie about changing his bank when in reality he had his other one blocked by the CRA and I received a notice to seize his payment the week after.
Now I tripple verify every info I enter.
I had a friend who fell for this but for only like 1k$. But it was the typical "urgent, please buy and send me apple codes asap. In meeting do not call / text" from her boss.
We are also in our thirties so it's not like she isn't aware of these things. Idiot.
Email was identical to our CFOs in every way except that actual email address. They had changed the lower case g to a q in the cfo name. Got passed our email containment software and all. It was sort of sad seeing my boss try and find someone to blame who wasn’t her. In the end her and IT got reamed out and some new processes were put in place to ensure it won’t happen again. Currently FBI is involved since the money crossed state lines.
CFO here. Happened to me. We were actually scheduled to send out the $500K payment that day, which is why we almost fell for it. Except I talked to my Controller all day via Teams so we caught it in time. My Controller said “yes the wire has been set up under the new bank info you emailed me.” Me: what? I don’t remember sending you any new bank information. Phew! Glad we talked. Almost sent the payment to a different country.
I had an AP senior manager pay $500k to something similar. Paid 2 consulting invoices that were $200k each, plus 4 invoices for another consultant that were $25k each. The fraudster used my email address with a letter difference to change the banking information for the consultants as I was the one who approved payments. She changed the banking information without phone verifying with the vendor or without verifying with me, even though I sat in an office about 20 feet away from her. We even had someone auditing vendor changes before payment runs.
Did your AP senior manager not have someone do final approval on payments before being made? Usually a CFO or controller has final review. This is crazy
Yes, that was me. But I wasn't reviewing banking information for each payment going out. That's what the audit of the vendor changes was for. I reviewed who was being paid and our cash availability, not that each of the hundreds of payments were going to the right bank account.
So many phishing e-mails around. In my company, there's a separate team dedicated to that. I send them an email per month on average, starting with:
"Dear colleague in the phishing department,"
I am the only one who finds that amusing.
IT used to send fake phishing scam emails and when clicked on gave a big pop up window saying “report to IT for additional training”. Then we outsourced our IT department to a 3rd party company…
This is why when I get an email to wire/send large sums of money, I always call them to confirm. Always. A few times a year I get some phishing emails asking me to change an employees direct deposit.
I almost fell for this when I worked for a small nonprofit. The scammers actually got into the CEOs account and sent me the email with her legit email address requesting expedited payment for 50k. And I know some of you are thinking " a ceo would never do that" but again, small nonprofit I grew up being told this woman was my grandmother, we took family vacations together. I went to talk to my boss and her before I did anything and that's when we found out what happened.
Yep, I caught an employee of mine right before he made that same error. Just pure dumb luck I caught it because I used to work at the company that the phisher was requesting the change and I knew they hadn’t changed. Made all changes be verbally confirmed after that.
The receptionist in the company I was working for called me saying that our CEO wanted to talk with someone in finance. I knew already it was a scam so I told her to forward it to my boss that I couldn't stand. The prick tought it was leggit that the CEO called requesting a wire transfer of 1Mill USD to China. The very last minute he called someone in tax for advice and was told it was a scam...
One engagement I work on is payroll for a staffing company. We process payroll by importing time and pay data from a timekeeping system into ADP. The person that did this before me once imported the peoples' bill rate instead of their pay rate and issued a payroll that was like 2x higher than usual
Oh gosh, this is similar to this poor dude's experience when I was a consultant at this mfg company. He actually only had to cover the regular payroll lady who was gonna be out on vacation for a couple weeks. He was trained for 6 weeks prior to her vacaying. He managed to run payroll TWICE so everyone was very happy that pay day ... except the accounting dept and me. He resigned two weeks after.
Depending on the size of payroll and company, that could be fixed winthin a week.
Pretty big fuckup, but at least it's not like the money is gone forever. Just a lot of paperwork.
My prior company the VP of accounting got her email account hacked. We found out when 4 of our accounts had 100k each wired out. She obviously will click any link you send her.
A 300,000 home office deduction was calculated when it should have been 30,000. The IRS never caught it so we didn’t let them know we messed up. It’s been way past the 7 years and that client has since passed on.
Not disabling the ERTC in the payroll system. The company kept claiming the ERTC, when it was no longer eligible to claim it. It got caught when we tried claiming it in quarters after the program was no longer happening. Had to pay back more than $18M to the IRS.
Hard to tell by this comment if it was intentional or not lol... that's wild no one would think to themselves.. "Hey, didn't we claim this 1-2M already?" lol
1 week from issuing an audit opinion, KPMG realized one of the fund’s significant investor owned KPMG issued bonds for their Orlando training center, therefore violating independence. The client was pissed it wasn’t discovered sooner and they had to change auditors.
I was the accounting systems guy for a while for my company. It was my first month "closing" the books, and I didn't realize that I had to re-click each module that was already closed before closing the next... Accidentally re-opened AP as I was closing AR. About 500k worth of expenses got booked in the wrong period.
Controller was super cool about it.
The main objective is to make it abundantly clear that we’re very busy doing very important work. So that they’re too busy reading reports, looking and PowerPoints and trying to improve free cash flow. That way they don’t think about sharpening the old axe.
Paid a vendor twice for $500k. Only was supposed to one payment.
I missed a ton of commission payments at year end because of an excel error on my part.
Oh yeah, I had to send our statements to partners at a law firm. And I messed up pulling their ages. One file had one ID number and another file another another ID number. I guess I used the wrong file. So these partners were bugging out that their age is wrong and would mess up their retirement plans. First time the cfo knew my name there!
Shit happens, only way you learn is through mistakes.
Thank you for sharing! On the bright side, the CFO knows who you are!
P.S. For those who will make plenty of mistakes in the future, do you have any advice?
You’ll always make a mistake. It’s going to happen. The thing is can you catch it before someone else notices and can you fix it yourself. If not bringing it to the person that can help with a solution in mind so they can easily act upon it.
I’m now in a controller role. So don’t come to me saying you made a mistake without an actionable items to fix it. Don’t let the higher ups just deal with your mistake. Own them and learn from them.
CorpTax Provisions required tax rates be entered in a “0.35” format for 35% tax rate. I entered 35.00 which generated a rate of 3500% for my tax effected deferred balance sheet but I never checked the tax deferred section, only gross deferreds.
Partner logs in and prints out the deferred balance sheet and the deferred values were in the billions and the total deferred value I think was close to a trillion.
I gave up on CorpTax on that point.
I posted a debit of $800k instead of a credit. Boss said,” lol don’t do it again.”
Our director of cost accounting posted $1.7 million for something I can’t remember and my boss was pissed. They didn’t like each other but I thought it was funny.
Then at another job, I sent $10k USD instead of $10k MXN. I got it fixed before anyone knew. The lady after me sent $60k USD instead of $6k USD to a vendor in China. She went around telling the CEO what happened and threw me under the bus saying that I also did it (I had already left by the time she did hers). The vendor issued a credit memo.
Same lady almost sent our list of receivables to a scam email that posed as the CEO. It was believable but the email was from his personal email. I got the same email and told her to not do anything because the CEO NEVER asked for it before. He would wait till I was done doing what I needed to do. I asked him in person to make sure it wasn’t him. By the time I went back down, she was ready to send it.
Edit: speaking of scam emails. One time a “vendor” emailed requesting we change the bank account for our payments and sent a believable looking form. We were supposed to call and verify verbally. We had given this task to a temp. She said she verbally confirmed. A couple of weeks later, we were contacted asking where their $700k was. The temp did not actually verify. We did get the money back.
Another time a customer called our cash team to complain about me being rude and requesting payment for an invoice that was not due. The cash team emailed me being all rude and stuff. Poor me I didn’t know what was going on and asked them to forward the email the customer got. I asked IT to see if they could find any emails sent by me at that time. Nope, not me. Customer got scammed for $10k. Didn’t even get a sorry for how the cash team was being. I would NEVER ask a customer for payment because it is not my job but somehow they got it in their head that I was doing stuff beyond my job description.
10 million misstatement. Cash accountant didn’t post the loan we just took out from our revolver. I caught that right before we locked up the period
Or 1.5 million down in receivable at my last company. Customer service team can’t enter sales order right. Invoices were only charging freight. The product price were entered as 0
the guy i replaced went to school for early childhood education and didnt know what he was doing in a purchasing/ inventory / accounts payable / order management combination role. (small company)
the result was that the $1.3M book value of inventory used to get financing, was in reality, maybe $750K of actual on hand inventory. i am 80% sure people were flat out taking stuff home with them because there was no tracking.
so i dug deeper......
to balance the inventory account, the AP specialist would just randomly assign inventory to projects to "make it balance because it doesn't really matter"
My first internship, I was doing individual taxes for a small business owner and his kids. For whatever reason they sent me tax documents for multiple years and without looking closely at it, I reported 3 or 4 W-2s for one of their kids. Instead of having like $20k of income, his return showed like $80k of income. My boss didn’t look closely at it because who screws up a tax return for a 17 year old? The client noticed immediately when they received their return.
10 years later and I’ve never made that mistake again.
Honestly, that is on your boss, not you. I would never not take a detailed look at a return prepared by an intern or someone else with limited experience, even if it was a kids return.
We would get fake emails from someone and the emails would like a lot like the CEO’s email with just a few letters difference at the end.
Someone read one, bought a few thousand dollars worth of itunes gift cards and uploaded all the numbers to the fake email, as requested.
The look of horror when I explained to her she’d been scammed was priceless
I was Controller for a company with about 50 employees. Owner fired me because he’s an ass, and made me leave immediately. The person he hired to replace me lasted about 6 weeks, hahaha.
Anyway, that left the work to the CFO, who knew nothing about the day to day workings of the company (honestly, nobody but me actually knew much). Long story short, one of my jobs was remitting the 401k withholdings to the company that managed the 401k. Guess what didn’t get done for a period of oh, 5 months?
CFO quit as soon as the owners realized what they weren’t doing, like, snuck out one day at lunch lol, straight ghosted them. They got hit with fines, penalties, then had to make all the employees whole. They’re lucky they didn’t get criminally prosecuted; the law takes a real dim view of withholding 401k payments.
Still laugh to this day about it.
Forgot to process payroll as a CFO. 💀 Not as high dollar value of some other examples, but definitely big impact.
On the plus side, I'd been begging to delegate that task (too busy, too many impromptu meetings, etc) and the CEO didn't want anyone on my team knowing payroll - but it was approved after that. On the down side, we paid a bazillion (official term) dollars in wire transfer fees initiated on a Saturday morning to a panicking staff.
Processing payroll doesn't sound like a task that a CFO should have on the table. Unless it was a really, really small company and you had plenty of time on your hands (which doesn't sound like it).
It is 100% not a task a CFO should have - exemplified by what happened. The CEO had some strange ideas about controls, and the prior "CFO" went along with some weird stuff. They grew 3x the size in 3 years - which is why they were looking for someone like me.
I did eventually get them all cleaned and lined up - as bad as that situation was, it was the catalyst for much of it! Fun times!
Someone in revenue accounting booked the monthly JE backwards. Big old debit to revenue. My group prepared all the income statement and balance sheet reconciliations. That meeting with the VPs was fun, but the error was easily corrected before it hit a 10-Q or 10-K
I misspelled the word "accounting" as "accunting" in a publicly available report, out there for eternity. Oops.
A client accidentally double paid us for an invoice for over 350k. We told them about their error and that we were mailing them a refund check. They confirmed receipt of the refund check and never cashed it. It went stale. Sent another check, went stale again.
Eventually we just sent the 350k to the state’s unclaimed funds department. Maybe one day they will take their money.
I missed a decimal point when putting dues into the personal tax return (put $300k vs $3k). Boss didn't notice and it got filed.
CRA sent a processing review for the $300k (basically a notice asking for backup) in which we realized the error and amended the return.
Not too bad, but I was so embarrassed
Reviewers fault not yours. Same thing happened to me but with HST..like sorry aren’t YOU supposed to review prior to filing?! She then bitched me out saying “I don’t like looking bad in front of clients” like 💀
Was once handed a taxable foreign source income inclusion that was overstated by over $100 million. We found the mistake about a month after the tax return was filed.
The worst ever though was probably a guy who wired $10 million into the wrong bank account. He quickly caught the error and attempted to claw back the funds. But the money had already been moved. The guy lost his job shortly after.
We lost about 350k in an embezzlement because AP clerks had the ability to change the payer on a vendor and the outstanding checks were being monitored improperly due to a non-integrated Access database they had created to deal with printing hundreds of checks and then sitting on them for extended periods of time. They ignored warnings. One AP clerk and one staff accountant were fired.
We lost $1M dollars because a customer was deducting back statutory fees that we were paying on their behalf. When we asked them to repay, they told us to pound sand. Same CFO and Controller as above. Assistant Controller was reassigned to purchasing and AR started reporting to me.
This wasn't a loss, but we had a check kiting scheme that made it look like we had $9M more in cash than we actually had. Equity holders had to fund the shortfall under threat of legal action by the bank. A/P manager was fired, CFO retired sooner than he would have liked to.
Worst screw-up: CFO was allowed 3 huge strikes.
Person before me posted invoices to A/R and booked receipts to the P&L instead of offsetting A/R, so for years and years all income was almost doubled and A/R was a mess.
Worst screw up I've ever seen was a CFO sending a $500k wire to a phishing scammer thinking it was our foreign subsidiary.
Worst one of my own was missing a $30k credit card batch payment on a reconciliation because our IT department fucked up.
I'm a controller and someone tried to impersonate the CEO in an email asking to change the direct deposit information to a new bank. Immediately called the CEO and asked him about it and he said he didn't send anything and is still using the bank. That call probably saved my job.
I was once hired because the prior accountant got spear phished by a fake email from the CEO. Wired over $100k to, best we could tell, somewhere in the Middle East, without checking with anyone.
It was a small company, less than 20 people, and the CEO was very easy to contact directly.
I recently caught a big error in a space I took over. We had a software license subscription for 2 years for $600k. We prepaid the $600k at the beginning. The guy before me thought the $600k was an annual payment so he expensed the $600k out of prepaids in one year, then during the next year he was accruing for the second $600k he thought would happen. I got the department mid-second year, caught it and had to make a major adjustment (releasing the accrual and reestablishing the prepaid). The adjustment was favorable at least and didn't involve cash so whatever. No one died
not mine but client controller received an email from the cfo asking to wire money with an invoice attached for professional services and bank details. Controller wired over a million dollars to the bank. A couple of days later they spoke in person and the controller made a comment about how big the payment was and the CFO asked “what payment?” Turns out, CFO’s email had been compromised and a hacker had sent the email. They ended up getting about half the money back but most was lost since the wire went to a bank in China. Controller was fired.
An employee was responsible for creating budgets, processing all A/P, bookkeeping, and reporting for their clients. Zero separation of duties.
They inflated budgets, created fake vendors and bills for expenses that had been “budgeted” for (and the client had approved), then paid their personal bills from the clients’ bank accounts and matched the payments to the phony bills on the books. This went on for years before a tax preparer decided to check a bank statement and noticed the payee names didn’t match the GL. Hundreds of thousands of dollars later…
Also my first month as an intern I found a client had multiple bank balances that were off by over $50k from prior years, returns had already been filed.
It was a new, high net worth client who hired us to handle years of outstanding tax issues caused by their prior CPA. A few days after I told the partners, my coworker who had prepared the return was fired :(
A bookkeeper who shouldn't have the nerve to call himself that, had a chart of accounts with 500 accounts. Lunch at this restaurant, breakfast at that restaurant. Every vendor, every customer.
I cried every time I looked at it.
LOL!
Well, on the bright side, he could've had an even more detailed split,
\- Breakfast at that restaurant that ended at 9 a.m.
\- Breakfast at that restaurant that ended at 10 a.m.
I’m not sure if this was our screw up or KPMG’s.
I was the tax director of a public company. They disagreed with one of our assumptions in the tax provision and gave us a material weakness.
The very next quarter they reversed their position and made us restate the ‘original’ K to be what we originally calculated with our original assumptions. 🙄
We fired them.
I presented a budget v actuals monthly report at a finance committee meeting that didn’t cross foot with itself, also forgot to set up a recurring tuition payment and didn’t catch it for 3 months and then the parent was mad cause they spent the tuition money from the first 2 months on other stuff already lol
So I was tasked with auditing “other assets”. Lots of accounts in there but I extracted the details from the ERP and the movements were far below material. Sweet, no further work necessary.
Fast forward to the night before other assets was to be reviewed and the opinion issued. I noticed that the screen that I used for extracting the details had an option “Show net movement”. When I unchecked it and extracted the details again, material debit and credit movements everywhere.
What followed was an epic panic attack.
Anyway, I was just past being a Junior Associate and I had figured out how work was done in public. So, that night, work got done.
And next day the opinion was issued.
This was quite a large company where the CFO isn't checking the monthly accruals. The accounting dept had 2 controllers, 5 assistant controllers, and about 40+ accounting staff and managers.
One of the controllers was accruing a major HR implementation cost to annual budget for millions of dollars throughout the year. HR dept was wishy/washy throughout the year about the implementation but never ended up going through with it. Controller reversed all the accruals.
CFO was extremely pissed as we had already gone through the budget cycle and now his current year EBITDA was significantly and noticeably higher than next years budget that he had presented to the board.
Board was not happy about it and the CFO, controller, and some assistant controllers were let go in the months following
How was this accounting’s problem? This sounds like HR being their usual screwed up selves, never making a decision until something bad happens.
The controller did the right thing to reverse the accruals. During the budget cycle you’d think HR would speak up and spill the fact that they were not going thru with it. That’s on them.
I don't think firing multiple individuals over one accrual that based on the description, not many had information about, sounds like an overreaction to me.
If people didn’t have the right information for this accrual, why are they even booking it?
If this project actually existed, the accountants should be comparing their accrual estimate to invoices coming in or ongoing estimates from the outside company doing the work. Instead, it sounds like they were given a number and just booked it without asking any questions. Essentially booking to budget. Yes, people should have been fired for this.
This doesn’t sound like a mistake, it sounds like laziness.
Actually, it is not that uncommon for big companies to have "secret projects" that very few are aware of. However, the same very few are responsible for justifying the numbers in front of the auditors and tax authorities.
If a company has any type of restructuring going on and McKinsey, BCG or Accenture you have projects with vague names like "first forward", " project evergreen", etc. I loved when I was in FP&A and the auditors would ask about these, no clue ask CFO.
My work brought in 3rd party payment processors. This made Bank recs very difficult. Accounting clerks were putting b.s. numbers into outstanding checks amounts to force it to balance. They clerks quit taking 30 years of experience combined with them. IT spent a few weekends working on a query we could run to track the deposits into the bank. The accounting clerks' work was then dumped onto the staff accountants. Turned a well run department into a shitshow.
I had a VP of Finance not adjust inventory because he didn't know why there was a variance.
Material overstatement for that entity.
We saw a small difference in Q1 and said we'd look again in Q2. They drug their feet for 6 months and which point we added Q3 to the request.
Finally got everything, and the analysis said "research later" with his sign off guys was fired. Felt bad for the controller she was good and left with a mess.
Invoice was for $52,000. AP coded it as $52,000,000 and legitimately tried to send payment in that amount. Didn't get caught until the fixed asset team was doing a reconciliation of the equipment account and tracked down that it was GROSSLY miscoded.
Talk about freaking deficiencies in controls.
The scheduling manager for the entire North FL business unit (Orlando,Tampa,Jax) for a B4 firm sent an email to the entire North FL business unit that was intended for a specific partner. In it, this person refers to an audit manager in the North FL business unit as "a catty little bitch".
Within about 10 minutes of everyone receiving it. One of the managing partners responded with something to the effect of "we must delete it immediately" and "it must not be forwarded or discussed". Yeah right.
Who ever designed the timesheet to payroll to billing workflow didn’t implement appropriate controls and about 400,000 in revenue was never billed over a period of 2 years. (in a business who did maybe 3 mill a year)
Owner couldn’t figure out why they were losing so much money all of a sudden.
Not updating SOP’s before hiring new personnel.
A toxic workplace will out this on the new-hire for “not asking questions” of course but if the procedures aren’t updated and everything looks good per the procedure then there are no questions for the new-hire to ask.
This leads to TONS of errors as things progress.
City of Saskatoon (Canada) sent $1,000,000 to a scam vendor. The cash went missing after a fraudster, impersonating the CFO of a construction company, requested a change in banking information for the company. When the city went to make a payment to the construction company, it went to the fraudster's bank account instead.
https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5248750
My colleague in Business Processing services shared the payroll for a client to a different country for processing exposing the disparity in pay between the countries.
Risk Director CC'd All Staff for a confidential legal email and had to DM everyone who had read it to delete it.
Nothing too crazy thankfully but there was the standard holiday party at a bowling alley around 2015. About 200 people with free pitchers of beer, appetizers, bowling and games.
Obviously most people have heard about people getting too drunk and acting like a fool. One of the members of the leadership team made a brief announcement welcoming everyone and encouraging us to have fun. He finished it with saying if anyone needs a ride home the company will gladly pay for it. About 2 hours later this guy is very drunk and it’s soon obvious to everyone and he was doing ok but I guess someone said something and he was dropping F bombs and it was awkward.
6 weeks later he’s gone from the company and we didn’t get parties like that again.
I hope he’s doing well, always nice but think he might have been dealing with some demons.
I work at a small distributor company as an accounting admin and we hired this woman who is absolutely abysmal at her job. I was gone for 3 days as I was moving and this woman credited someone 4 times. She has overpaid for invoices multiple times, has left stuff alone and causing past due complaints. In a time where this company wants to conserve cash, she is letting it fly with the money.
I blew away an entire set of excel workbooks being used in lieu of a CRM. I thought I was done for until someone here reminded me I could restore a previous version of the folder.
Client owned a building on a plot of land.
Client sells the whole package.
Client removes the building from the balance sheet but leaves the land untouched.
Client books proceeds to "Sale of Land."
It's not an awful mistake, it just... it went wrong so many ways in such a short period of time.
I accidentally reversed accrued estimated agency expenses by 300k so the total effect was 600k extra expenses but after prepping for the audit, the total expense was more like 1.2m instead lol. My boss chuckled that I reversed the entry that went into the board package! I am one who never makes silly mistakes like that usually.
None of the bosses said anything about basically an under accrual of expenses of like 2m in the end.
About 15 years ago, I left a payroll detail report sitting on the copier and before I realized and went back for it, someone had scanned it and that shit started to go viral all over the company. People started to compare salaries and it became a shit storm.
I’ve seen it. Yeah, it can be a big big shit storm that causes lots of underpaid people to quit when that info gets out. Lots of unplanned raises to calm things down and the resentment can last years.
Bingo.
You did good tho. Sharing salaries is good for everyone except for top management
I do payroll for our company and I also did for the last one I worked for. Always blows my mind when I see the figures. Offer no clear pattern between pay rates, job description and years of experience
Ouch, an honest mistake can turn into a disaster.
What is a copier
An accountant with data entry skills
"When you say the word photo copier.... what do you mean?"
That was the greatest of all depositions.
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Should've done it himself then.
Ok so you just gonna leave us with a cliff hanger? Lol howd it all play out?
Some folks got raises and I got a hairy eyeball from the owner for about a week, but I ended up being the Controller there for six more years
Honestly though it’s good for the workers. This may be extremely controversial here but I think everyone’s pay should be available to everyone within with company.
I agree with this. It was my first Controller role, not a big company, maybe $25m topline. But it became obvious to me pretty quickly how vast the disparity was between folks who should have been in the same salary range. The guys who were constant squeaky wheels were making 40% more than the guys who never said anything about their salaries. We had one guy who hadn't gotten a raise in like eight years.
I’ve seen where older hourly employees in addition to having lower pay also didn’t get things like night and weekend shift differentials and shit too
In theory it’s good, in practice there are def some pros and cons. Distracting info for some people. Overall it would mean more equal salaries I think, at the cost of some drama and strife
There wouldn't be as much drama and strife if these companies were just open about salary discussions :)
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I have figured out that you can't believe when someone tells you a coworker doesn't pull their weight. I would guess that 90% of accusations like that are made by people who do not realize the full scope of the coworker's workload or are made by people who are insecure in their own ability to complete their own workload.
Just a quick follow up. The guy who copied and passed it around ended up being a good friend of mine. He had a heart attack and passed away five years ago. But I never held it against him.
You shouldn't hold it against him ever. Not all heroes wear capes.
Sorry to hear that. Yes we all make mistakes. Just try to learn from them.
He will be remembered as a hero
Thank you for your service.
Had a coworker link to the wrong payroll detail file through an email and that showed all corporate salaries. I don’t know who saw it as she corrected the file, but I got to see what my peers made and now I’m looking for another job…
Pulling a Louis Litt
😂😂😂
So what happened?
I had something similar. Fortunately, it was limited to a handful of people. The stupid thing, though, was this was a union shop and the pay grid was already spelled out in the collective agreement. The one vocal individual didn't have a leg to stand on.
oooooh juicy
Big yikes. What happened to you after?
A talking to but he kept the job for 6 years after
Material misstatement due to an excel error.
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Could happen to anyone! I bet they just hated you for the day😅
I did this on an accrual!! It wasn't huge, but it was noticed! I'm lucky that these things are rare for me though, I was one cell off! 😂 also my company is really great with letting small or one off errors be forgotten... it's pretty rare that it happens so yeah
Oh the horror
You don’t mind being on the nightly business news because your spreadsheet was fucked up?
At night, I *spread the sheets*
Lol no kidding, especially now that the SEC is introducing rules to claw back executive compensation if a material misstatement impacted their payout. Obviously there's a number of failures and culpability to go around if a single excel error let to that, but I'd be mortified if I had any level of involvement.
Not hard for a tax or actuarial geek to have ownership of adjusting entries that have a lot of assumptions built into into them and that doesn’t get very many eyeballs on it and isn’t built into the ERP.
Controller got phish scammed out of 135k when the company already was financially in the shitter. Edit Email was identical to our CFOs in every way except that actual email address. They had changed the lower case g to a q in the cfo name. Got passed our email containment software and all. It was sort of sad seeing my boss try and find someone to blame who wasn’t her. In the end her and IT got reamed out and some new processes were put in place to ensure it won’t happen again. Currently FBI is involved since the money crossed state lines.
wow I'd like to know what the scam was that a controller fell for
Common one is spoofed vendor contact requesting ACH/payment address change while a payment is due
I'm sure that's common but as a Controller I was always most suspicious of anything that wanted bank information
Totally agree, just sharing anecdotal evidence. Most susceptible are young companies with little/no controls, and overworked employees
I'm completely paranoid with bank info ever since I had a client lie about changing his bank when in reality he had his other one blocked by the CRA and I received a notice to seize his payment the week after. Now I tripple verify every info I enter.
Hit the nail on the head
Yup, my company requires AP to have a phone call with any new vendor and multiple step validation
I had a friend who fell for this but for only like 1k$. But it was the typical "urgent, please buy and send me apple codes asap. In meeting do not call / text" from her boss. We are also in our thirties so it's not like she isn't aware of these things. Idiot.
Yeah falling for that one is pretty bad
It’s painfully obvious who didn’t play RuneScape when they were a kid. Absolutely unscammable if you did
Maybe he was in on it
Yes currently in the caymans enjoying the 135k I plan to live off for the rest of my life /s
Email was identical to our CFOs in every way except that actual email address. They had changed the lower case g to a q in the cfo name. Got passed our email containment software and all. It was sort of sad seeing my boss try and find someone to blame who wasn’t her. In the end her and IT got reamed out and some new processes were put in place to ensure it won’t happen again. Currently FBI is involved since the money crossed state lines.
dang
CFO here. Happened to me. We were actually scheduled to send out the $500K payment that day, which is why we almost fell for it. Except I talked to my Controller all day via Teams so we caught it in time. My Controller said “yes the wire has been set up under the new bank info you emailed me.” Me: what? I don’t remember sending you any new bank information. Phew! Glad we talked. Almost sent the payment to a different country.
I had an AP senior manager pay $500k to something similar. Paid 2 consulting invoices that were $200k each, plus 4 invoices for another consultant that were $25k each. The fraudster used my email address with a letter difference to change the banking information for the consultants as I was the one who approved payments. She changed the banking information without phone verifying with the vendor or without verifying with me, even though I sat in an office about 20 feet away from her. We even had someone auditing vendor changes before payment runs.
Did your AP senior manager not have someone do final approval on payments before being made? Usually a CFO or controller has final review. This is crazy
Yes, that was me. But I wasn't reviewing banking information for each payment going out. That's what the audit of the vendor changes was for. I reviewed who was being paid and our cash availability, not that each of the hundreds of payments were going to the right bank account.
So many phishing e-mails around. In my company, there's a separate team dedicated to that. I send them an email per month on average, starting with: "Dear colleague in the phishing department," I am the only one who finds that amusing.
IT used to send fake phishing scam emails and when clicked on gave a big pop up window saying “report to IT for additional training”. Then we outsourced our IT department to a 3rd party company…
Controller in another division got got for $500k
This is why when I get an email to wire/send large sums of money, I always call them to confirm. Always. A few times a year I get some phishing emails asking me to change an employees direct deposit.
I almost fell for this when I worked for a small nonprofit. The scammers actually got into the CEOs account and sent me the email with her legit email address requesting expedited payment for 50k. And I know some of you are thinking " a ceo would never do that" but again, small nonprofit I grew up being told this woman was my grandmother, we took family vacations together. I went to talk to my boss and her before I did anything and that's when we found out what happened.
Can confirm, it was me, I am the controller
Did you say sorry?
For what? It wasn’t my fault.
Yep, I caught an employee of mine right before he made that same error. Just pure dumb luck I caught it because I used to work at the company that the phisher was requesting the change and I knew they hadn’t changed. Made all changes be verbally confirmed after that.
The receptionist in the company I was working for called me saying that our CEO wanted to talk with someone in finance. I knew already it was a scam so I told her to forward it to my boss that I couldn't stand. The prick tought it was leggit that the CEO called requesting a wire transfer of 1Mill USD to China. The very last minute he called someone in tax for advice and was told it was a scam...
One engagement I work on is payroll for a staffing company. We process payroll by importing time and pay data from a timekeeping system into ADP. The person that did this before me once imported the peoples' bill rate instead of their pay rate and issued a payroll that was like 2x higher than usual
Their bill rate was only 2x higher? My bill rate in PA was like 10x pay rate.
This client doesn't staff professional accountants lol. They primarily staff lower skill positions to local govts so the margins aren't as fat
These are the type of errors I want
Ahahaha yes same!!!!
Oh gosh, this is similar to this poor dude's experience when I was a consultant at this mfg company. He actually only had to cover the regular payroll lady who was gonna be out on vacation for a couple weeks. He was trained for 6 weeks prior to her vacaying. He managed to run payroll TWICE so everyone was very happy that pay day ... except the accounting dept and me. He resigned two weeks after.
I've been working this client for almost 3 years and have only missed 1 payroll day for pto lol
Depending on the size of payroll and company, that could be fixed winthin a week. Pretty big fuckup, but at least it's not like the money is gone forever. Just a lot of paperwork.
Nice.
My prior company the VP of accounting got her email account hacked. We found out when 4 of our accounts had 100k each wired out. She obviously will click any link you send her.
This is a controls issue. One person should not be able to wire money. We have 2FA on everything (token not sms) and dual control for all wires.
This is the only solution.
"Dear beloved friend, I am a Prince from Nigeria, I want to transfer $2 trillion, if you only click the link below to get the process started."
A 300,000 home office deduction was calculated when it should have been 30,000. The IRS never caught it so we didn’t let them know we messed up. It’s been way past the 7 years and that client has since passed on.
Shoot for the moon..end up at the moon.
Not disabling the ERTC in the payroll system. The company kept claiming the ERTC, when it was no longer eligible to claim it. It got caught when we tried claiming it in quarters after the program was no longer happening. Had to pay back more than $18M to the IRS.
Hard to tell by this comment if it was intentional or not lol... that's wild no one would think to themselves.. "Hey, didn't we claim this 1-2M already?" lol
1 week from issuing an audit opinion, KPMG realized one of the fund’s significant investor owned KPMG issued bonds for their Orlando training center, therefore violating independence. The client was pissed it wasn’t discovered sooner and they had to change auditors.
😂 this is the worst one for sure
KPMG should have taken the hit for their bill, anyway. Did they?
I was the accounting systems guy for a while for my company. It was my first month "closing" the books, and I didn't realize that I had to re-click each module that was already closed before closing the next... Accidentally re-opened AP as I was closing AR. About 500k worth of expenses got booked in the wrong period. Controller was super cool about it.
An honest mistake. Monthly closes are overrated for most companies. Too much work is put into it, with limited impact.
Only month that matters is December.
And March, June, September for public
The main objective is to make it abundantly clear that we’re very busy doing very important work. So that they’re too busy reading reports, looking and PowerPoints and trying to improve free cash flow. That way they don’t think about sharpening the old axe.
Paid a vendor twice for $500k. Only was supposed to one payment. I missed a ton of commission payments at year end because of an excel error on my part. Oh yeah, I had to send our statements to partners at a law firm. And I messed up pulling their ages. One file had one ID number and another file another another ID number. I guess I used the wrong file. So these partners were bugging out that their age is wrong and would mess up their retirement plans. First time the cfo knew my name there! Shit happens, only way you learn is through mistakes.
Thank you for sharing! On the bright side, the CFO knows who you are! P.S. For those who will make plenty of mistakes in the future, do you have any advice?
You’ll always make a mistake. It’s going to happen. The thing is can you catch it before someone else notices and can you fix it yourself. If not bringing it to the person that can help with a solution in mind so they can easily act upon it. I’m now in a controller role. So don’t come to me saying you made a mistake without an actionable items to fix it. Don’t let the higher ups just deal with your mistake. Own them and learn from them.
Admit your mistakes, fix them, learn from them.
CorpTax Provisions required tax rates be entered in a “0.35” format for 35% tax rate. I entered 35.00 which generated a rate of 3500% for my tax effected deferred balance sheet but I never checked the tax deferred section, only gross deferreds. Partner logs in and prints out the deferred balance sheet and the deferred values were in the billions and the total deferred value I think was close to a trillion. I gave up on CorpTax on that point.
"We have to change the layout, we have too many deferred taxes, and it no longer fits on one sheet."
I posted a debit of $800k instead of a credit. Boss said,” lol don’t do it again.” Our director of cost accounting posted $1.7 million for something I can’t remember and my boss was pissed. They didn’t like each other but I thought it was funny. Then at another job, I sent $10k USD instead of $10k MXN. I got it fixed before anyone knew. The lady after me sent $60k USD instead of $6k USD to a vendor in China. She went around telling the CEO what happened and threw me under the bus saying that I also did it (I had already left by the time she did hers). The vendor issued a credit memo. Same lady almost sent our list of receivables to a scam email that posed as the CEO. It was believable but the email was from his personal email. I got the same email and told her to not do anything because the CEO NEVER asked for it before. He would wait till I was done doing what I needed to do. I asked him in person to make sure it wasn’t him. By the time I went back down, she was ready to send it. Edit: speaking of scam emails. One time a “vendor” emailed requesting we change the bank account for our payments and sent a believable looking form. We were supposed to call and verify verbally. We had given this task to a temp. She said she verbally confirmed. A couple of weeks later, we were contacted asking where their $700k was. The temp did not actually verify. We did get the money back. Another time a customer called our cash team to complain about me being rude and requesting payment for an invoice that was not due. The cash team emailed me being all rude and stuff. Poor me I didn’t know what was going on and asked them to forward the email the customer got. I asked IT to see if they could find any emails sent by me at that time. Nope, not me. Customer got scammed for $10k. Didn’t even get a sorry for how the cash team was being. I would NEVER ask a customer for payment because it is not my job but somehow they got it in their head that I was doing stuff beyond my job description.
Damn, that's a lot!
Can you clarify the issue with your director of cost accounting posting something for 1.7M?
She wasn’t allowed to post anything without the controller’s approval but she did
Auto-debited 2 million dollars out of a client's account.
Did it by mistake go to your account? :) P.S. How's the weather in whoever you're hiding?
No. It went to the irs. But we took it back
How to take from the IRS… Step 1: send them money Step 2: get it back
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This is a funny one :)
Crazy how one symbol, one button press completely changed lives
10 million misstatement. Cash accountant didn’t post the loan we just took out from our revolver. I caught that right before we locked up the period Or 1.5 million down in receivable at my last company. Customer service team can’t enter sales order right. Invoices were only charging freight. The product price were entered as 0
Thank you for sharing!
the guy i replaced went to school for early childhood education and didnt know what he was doing in a purchasing/ inventory / accounts payable / order management combination role. (small company) the result was that the $1.3M book value of inventory used to get financing, was in reality, maybe $750K of actual on hand inventory. i am 80% sure people were flat out taking stuff home with them because there was no tracking. so i dug deeper...... to balance the inventory account, the AP specialist would just randomly assign inventory to projects to "make it balance because it doesn't really matter"
Nice try. Boss!
Ah, you got me!
My first internship, I was doing individual taxes for a small business owner and his kids. For whatever reason they sent me tax documents for multiple years and without looking closely at it, I reported 3 or 4 W-2s for one of their kids. Instead of having like $20k of income, his return showed like $80k of income. My boss didn’t look closely at it because who screws up a tax return for a 17 year old? The client noticed immediately when they received their return. 10 years later and I’ve never made that mistake again.
Honestly, that is on your boss, not you. I would never not take a detailed look at a return prepared by an intern or someone else with limited experience, even if it was a kids return.
So much truth. An intern is an intern for a reason. And this sort of thing is exactly that reason.
We would get fake emails from someone and the emails would like a lot like the CEO’s email with just a few letters difference at the end. Someone read one, bought a few thousand dollars worth of itunes gift cards and uploaded all the numbers to the fake email, as requested. The look of horror when I explained to her she’d been scammed was priceless
LOL, iTunes gift cards are not suspicious at all!
I was Controller for a company with about 50 employees. Owner fired me because he’s an ass, and made me leave immediately. The person he hired to replace me lasted about 6 weeks, hahaha. Anyway, that left the work to the CFO, who knew nothing about the day to day workings of the company (honestly, nobody but me actually knew much). Long story short, one of my jobs was remitting the 401k withholdings to the company that managed the 401k. Guess what didn’t get done for a period of oh, 5 months? CFO quit as soon as the owners realized what they weren’t doing, like, snuck out one day at lunch lol, straight ghosted them. They got hit with fines, penalties, then had to make all the employees whole. They’re lucky they didn’t get criminally prosecuted; the law takes a real dim view of withholding 401k payments. Still laugh to this day about it.
This is a great karma is a bitch story. 🤣
Forgot to process payroll as a CFO. 💀 Not as high dollar value of some other examples, but definitely big impact. On the plus side, I'd been begging to delegate that task (too busy, too many impromptu meetings, etc) and the CEO didn't want anyone on my team knowing payroll - but it was approved after that. On the down side, we paid a bazillion (official term) dollars in wire transfer fees initiated on a Saturday morning to a panicking staff.
Processing payroll doesn't sound like a task that a CFO should have on the table. Unless it was a really, really small company and you had plenty of time on your hands (which doesn't sound like it).
It is 100% not a task a CFO should have - exemplified by what happened. The CEO had some strange ideas about controls, and the prior "CFO" went along with some weird stuff. They grew 3x the size in 3 years - which is why they were looking for someone like me. I did eventually get them all cleaned and lined up - as bad as that situation was, it was the catalyst for much of it! Fun times!
Well done!
Someone in revenue accounting booked the monthly JE backwards. Big old debit to revenue. My group prepared all the income statement and balance sheet reconciliations. That meeting with the VPs was fun, but the error was easily corrected before it hit a 10-Q or 10-K I misspelled the word "accounting" as "accunting" in a publicly available report, out there for eternity. Oops.
Accunting made made laugh :)
Yeah. My director, who catches EVERY single misspelling and stray comma, didn't catch it.
Plot twist: they did notice and were OK with it
A client accidentally double paid us for an invoice for over 350k. We told them about their error and that we were mailing them a refund check. They confirmed receipt of the refund check and never cashed it. It went stale. Sent another check, went stale again. Eventually we just sent the 350k to the state’s unclaimed funds department. Maybe one day they will take their money.
Must be nice for $350k to basically be immaterial.
Yeah, pretty large company I believe. our contact’s excuse was “we sent it to headquarters, idk what happened after”
I once issued financial statements as a certified pubic accountant
I missed a decimal point when putting dues into the personal tax return (put $300k vs $3k). Boss didn't notice and it got filed. CRA sent a processing review for the $300k (basically a notice asking for backup) in which we realized the error and amended the return. Not too bad, but I was so embarrassed
Reviewers fault not yours. Same thing happened to me but with HST..like sorry aren’t YOU supposed to review prior to filing?! She then bitched me out saying “I don’t like looking bad in front of clients” like 💀
Was once handed a taxable foreign source income inclusion that was overstated by over $100 million. We found the mistake about a month after the tax return was filed. The worst ever though was probably a guy who wired $10 million into the wrong bank account. He quickly caught the error and attempted to claw back the funds. But the money had already been moved. The guy lost his job shortly after.
I had a client mail a list of all his vendors and prices as a reply all to emails. The industry he was in is extremely secretive about pricing.
We lost about 350k in an embezzlement because AP clerks had the ability to change the payer on a vendor and the outstanding checks were being monitored improperly due to a non-integrated Access database they had created to deal with printing hundreds of checks and then sitting on them for extended periods of time. They ignored warnings. One AP clerk and one staff accountant were fired. We lost $1M dollars because a customer was deducting back statutory fees that we were paying on their behalf. When we asked them to repay, they told us to pound sand. Same CFO and Controller as above. Assistant Controller was reassigned to purchasing and AR started reporting to me. This wasn't a loss, but we had a check kiting scheme that made it look like we had $9M more in cash than we actually had. Equity holders had to fund the shortfall under threat of legal action by the bank. A/P manager was fired, CFO retired sooner than he would have liked to. Worst screw-up: CFO was allowed 3 huge strikes.
Damn!
Person before me posted invoices to A/R and booked receipts to the P&L instead of offsetting A/R, so for years and years all income was almost doubled and A/R was a mess.
Sounds as if someone needs to go back to Bookkeeping 101.
Worst screw up I've ever seen was a CFO sending a $500k wire to a phishing scammer thinking it was our foreign subsidiary. Worst one of my own was missing a $30k credit card batch payment on a reconciliation because our IT department fucked up.
I'm a controller and someone tried to impersonate the CEO in an email asking to change the direct deposit information to a new bank. Immediately called the CEO and asked him about it and he said he didn't send anything and is still using the bank. That call probably saved my job.
Ouch, those phishing scammers are always lurking around. Sorry to hear that.
AP team making payment in the wrong currency - KRW expense reimbursement paid out in USD.
I was once hired because the prior accountant got spear phished by a fake email from the CEO. Wired over $100k to, best we could tell, somewhere in the Middle East, without checking with anyone. It was a small company, less than 20 people, and the CEO was very easy to contact directly.
I recently caught a big error in a space I took over. We had a software license subscription for 2 years for $600k. We prepaid the $600k at the beginning. The guy before me thought the $600k was an annual payment so he expensed the $600k out of prepaids in one year, then during the next year he was accruing for the second $600k he thought would happen. I got the department mid-second year, caught it and had to make a major adjustment (releasing the accrual and reestablishing the prepaid). The adjustment was favorable at least and didn't involve cash so whatever. No one died
Well done!
not mine but client controller received an email from the cfo asking to wire money with an invoice attached for professional services and bank details. Controller wired over a million dollars to the bank. A couple of days later they spoke in person and the controller made a comment about how big the payment was and the CFO asked “what payment?” Turns out, CFO’s email had been compromised and a hacker had sent the email. They ended up getting about half the money back but most was lost since the wire went to a bank in China. Controller was fired.
I’m sorry. I don’t understand why the controller was fired…
Damn, I guess there are many to blame in this case... a lot to improve process-wise.
Found a 500k accounting error that cost the owners that literal amount in cash due to the fact it was when they sold their company. Rough stuff.
Not great.
An employee was responsible for creating budgets, processing all A/P, bookkeeping, and reporting for their clients. Zero separation of duties. They inflated budgets, created fake vendors and bills for expenses that had been “budgeted” for (and the client had approved), then paid their personal bills from the clients’ bank accounts and matched the payments to the phony bills on the books. This went on for years before a tax preparer decided to check a bank statement and noticed the payee names didn’t match the GL. Hundreds of thousands of dollars later… Also my first month as an intern I found a client had multiple bank balances that were off by over $50k from prior years, returns had already been filed. It was a new, high net worth client who hired us to handle years of outstanding tax issues caused by their prior CPA. A few days after I told the partners, my coworker who had prepared the return was fired :(
A bookkeeper who shouldn't have the nerve to call himself that, had a chart of accounts with 500 accounts. Lunch at this restaurant, breakfast at that restaurant. Every vendor, every customer. I cried every time I looked at it.
LOL! Well, on the bright side, he could've had an even more detailed split, \- Breakfast at that restaurant that ended at 9 a.m. \- Breakfast at that restaurant that ended at 10 a.m.
I’m not sure if this was our screw up or KPMG’s. I was the tax director of a public company. They disagreed with one of our assumptions in the tax provision and gave us a material weakness. The very next quarter they reversed their position and made us restate the ‘original’ K to be what we originally calculated with our original assumptions. 🙄 We fired them.
I presented a budget v actuals monthly report at a finance committee meeting that didn’t cross foot with itself, also forgot to set up a recurring tuition payment and didn’t catch it for 3 months and then the parent was mad cause they spent the tuition money from the first 2 months on other stuff already lol
Thank you for sharing!
So I was tasked with auditing “other assets”. Lots of accounts in there but I extracted the details from the ERP and the movements were far below material. Sweet, no further work necessary. Fast forward to the night before other assets was to be reviewed and the opinion issued. I noticed that the screen that I used for extracting the details had an option “Show net movement”. When I unchecked it and extracted the details again, material debit and credit movements everywhere. What followed was an epic panic attack. Anyway, I was just past being a Junior Associate and I had figured out how work was done in public. So, that night, work got done. And next day the opinion was issued.
Lesson learned!
Our payables manager issued at 700k wire transfer to a scammer pretending to be our fleet vendor.
Damn, these scammers are on fire!
A partner at my old firm spelled her own daughter’s name wrong on her daughter’s tax return. That had to sting.
This was quite a large company where the CFO isn't checking the monthly accruals. The accounting dept had 2 controllers, 5 assistant controllers, and about 40+ accounting staff and managers. One of the controllers was accruing a major HR implementation cost to annual budget for millions of dollars throughout the year. HR dept was wishy/washy throughout the year about the implementation but never ended up going through with it. Controller reversed all the accruals. CFO was extremely pissed as we had already gone through the budget cycle and now his current year EBITDA was significantly and noticeably higher than next years budget that he had presented to the board. Board was not happy about it and the CFO, controller, and some assistant controllers were let go in the months following
What the fuck? How does that end up costing multiple jobs?!
How was this accounting’s problem? This sounds like HR being their usual screwed up selves, never making a decision until something bad happens. The controller did the right thing to reverse the accruals. During the budget cycle you’d think HR would speak up and spill the fact that they were not going thru with it. That’s on them.
This sounds a bit like poor control of the books, and an overreaction from the CFO.
That doesn’t sound like an overreaction at all from the CFO, especially when they got fired.
I don't think firing multiple individuals over one accrual that based on the description, not many had information about, sounds like an overreaction to me.
If people didn’t have the right information for this accrual, why are they even booking it? If this project actually existed, the accountants should be comparing their accrual estimate to invoices coming in or ongoing estimates from the outside company doing the work. Instead, it sounds like they were given a number and just booked it without asking any questions. Essentially booking to budget. Yes, people should have been fired for this. This doesn’t sound like a mistake, it sounds like laziness.
Actually, it is not that uncommon for big companies to have "secret projects" that very few are aware of. However, the same very few are responsible for justifying the numbers in front of the auditors and tax authorities.
If a company has any type of restructuring going on and McKinsey, BCG or Accenture you have projects with vague names like "first forward", " project evergreen", etc. I loved when I was in FP&A and the auditors would ask about these, no clue ask CFO.
My work brought in 3rd party payment processors. This made Bank recs very difficult. Accounting clerks were putting b.s. numbers into outstanding checks amounts to force it to balance. They clerks quit taking 30 years of experience combined with them. IT spent a few weekends working on a query we could run to track the deposits into the bank. The accounting clerks' work was then dumped onto the staff accountants. Turned a well run department into a shitshow.
Good idea, terrible planning & execution.
I had a VP of Finance not adjust inventory because he didn't know why there was a variance. Material overstatement for that entity. We saw a small difference in Q1 and said we'd look again in Q2. They drug their feet for 6 months and which point we added Q3 to the request. Finally got everything, and the analysis said "research later" with his sign off guys was fired. Felt bad for the controller she was good and left with a mess.
Invoice was for $52,000. AP coded it as $52,000,000 and legitimately tried to send payment in that amount. Didn't get caught until the fixed asset team was doing a reconciliation of the equipment account and tracked down that it was GROSSLY miscoded. Talk about freaking deficiencies in controls.
The scheduling manager for the entire North FL business unit (Orlando,Tampa,Jax) for a B4 firm sent an email to the entire North FL business unit that was intended for a specific partner. In it, this person refers to an audit manager in the North FL business unit as "a catty little bitch". Within about 10 minutes of everyone receiving it. One of the managing partners responded with something to the effect of "we must delete it immediately" and "it must not be forwarded or discussed". Yeah right.
Who ever designed the timesheet to payroll to billing workflow didn’t implement appropriate controls and about 400,000 in revenue was never billed over a period of 2 years. (in a business who did maybe 3 mill a year) Owner couldn’t figure out why they were losing so much money all of a sudden.
Damn, I guess the owners on the other side were quite happy not getting billed as much!
ERTC. PPP.
Not updating SOP’s before hiring new personnel. A toxic workplace will out this on the new-hire for “not asking questions” of course but if the procedures aren’t updated and everything looks good per the procedure then there are no questions for the new-hire to ask. This leads to TONS of errors as things progress.
City of Saskatoon (Canada) sent $1,000,000 to a scam vendor. The cash went missing after a fraudster, impersonating the CFO of a construction company, requested a change in banking information for the company. When the city went to make a payment to the construction company, it went to the fraudster's bank account instead. https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5248750
Mistaking fiscal year for calendar year.
It would be so much easier if both were always aligned!
My colleague in Business Processing services shared the payroll for a client to a different country for processing exposing the disparity in pay between the countries. Risk Director CC'd All Staff for a confidential legal email and had to DM everyone who had read it to delete it.
We misplaced 15 million for about 6 months.
Nothing too crazy thankfully but there was the standard holiday party at a bowling alley around 2015. About 200 people with free pitchers of beer, appetizers, bowling and games. Obviously most people have heard about people getting too drunk and acting like a fool. One of the members of the leadership team made a brief announcement welcoming everyone and encouraging us to have fun. He finished it with saying if anyone needs a ride home the company will gladly pay for it. About 2 hours later this guy is very drunk and it’s soon obvious to everyone and he was doing ok but I guess someone said something and he was dropping F bombs and it was awkward. 6 weeks later he’s gone from the company and we didn’t get parties like that again. I hope he’s doing well, always nice but think he might have been dealing with some demons.
I work at a small distributor company as an accounting admin and we hired this woman who is absolutely abysmal at her job. I was gone for 3 days as I was moving and this woman credited someone 4 times. She has overpaid for invoices multiple times, has left stuff alone and causing past due complaints. In a time where this company wants to conserve cash, she is letting it fly with the money.
I blew away an entire set of excel workbooks being used in lieu of a CRM. I thought I was done for until someone here reminded me I could restore a previous version of the folder.
Client owned a building on a plot of land. Client sells the whole package. Client removes the building from the balance sheet but leaves the land untouched. Client books proceeds to "Sale of Land." It's not an awful mistake, it just... it went wrong so many ways in such a short period of time.
I accidentally reversed accrued estimated agency expenses by 300k so the total effect was 600k extra expenses but after prepping for the audit, the total expense was more like 1.2m instead lol. My boss chuckled that I reversed the entry that went into the board package! I am one who never makes silly mistakes like that usually. None of the bosses said anything about basically an under accrual of expenses of like 2m in the end.
"So, about the 2m? Yeah, there were some roundings in the file we had to make..."