Due diligence

[Black Bart]

After reading this inspiring story of efficiency in a government-run operation, I have resolved to stop complaining about the onerous burden of due diligence IRS requires of us. This article highlights DD's true worth -- clearly demonstrating that it's never too late to find out who's working for you.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/08/27/virginia.paid.for.no.work/index.html?iref=obinsite

[erchess]

This doesn't happen often

but the article leaves me too stunned for words. Well, almost

[travis bickle]

Sounds like

Tony Soprano arranged for and did the hiring

[Bees Knees]

Unfortunately, any increased due diligence as a result of this story will probably apply to the private sector as well. Government regulators who have never owned their own business have a hard time comprehending the concept that the private sector already has built in procedures in place to prevent something like this from happening. Its called the profit motive.

[gkaiseril]

This doesn't happen too often, but the article leaves me too stunned for words. Well, almost

Are you sure?

As the head of the Better Government Organization for Cook County says, there is nothing illegal going on in Cook County or Illinois, as the politicians have legalized all those activities.

My guess is that the missing employee did not perform the yard and pool maintenance for the new manager or add a new family room on to the manager's house.

Did anyone check to see how many times this employee voted in the last election?

Did anyone check to see if this employee lived in a vacant lot?

Anyone remember payroll audits and physically handing pay checks to employees and having them personally sign for the check?

[erchess]

R O F L You missed my wisecrack

What does not happen often is that something leaves me speechless or nearly so.

[taxdude71]

So do you think they are hiring?

[Roberts]

My firm is a broker/dealer that does taxes on the side. We are regulated by the SEC and FINRA and subject to routine examination. If you've ever been subjected to an SEC examination, you'd know a lot of their employees aren't really "showing up mentally" to work on a routine basis.

We are an ultra small firm - really really small and it's obvious what is happening within our firm. All the paperwork is there and we use Quickbooks for our finances. It's pretty easy to see we aren't doing anything seriously illegal, we could be doing things - just not anything major or it would be obvious. Well our examiners come in on Monday and stay generally until Thursday evening. One year the SEC examiner comes in with her boss on Monday and goes through some stuff, boss flies home at the end of the first day.

Tuesday the examiner finds a money market account we've fully documented and notices we haven't sent out to our clients a prospectus for this money market. Wow, she's got us. The entire day Tuesday she obsesses about this account. I can't figure out what the big deal is. Wednesday morning she's on the phone for hours talking to someone about this account. Wednesday about 3:00 she calls me into the conference room and has started writing us up for the violation. She's got us and is gitty. It was around 5:00 that I finally figured out her issue. She thought there was client money in and out of the account even though she could see every transaction in the account (about 12 per year or every month as we move profits over). Woops, we don't need to send out a prospectus when it's all our money.

All day Thursday she is making copies of our paperwork and begging us to allow her to take it back to the home office because she hadn't done ANY of the audit yet! We refused to allow her to take the documents because it would put us in violation of SEC requirements.