A tool for fighting company fraud.

Fraud continues to fill headlines, whether the schemes are old or new. Here's a tool to help practitioners stay up to date on investigating business fraud.

Although media coverage of the Madoff Ponzi scheme has abated, similar schemes earn headlines even when they are less spectacular in the volume of victims and their losses. Other frauds continue to gain notoriety, for example, hedge fund fraud, mortgage fraud, identity theft, and data and intellectual property theft.

Despite the notoriety of fraudulent acts and their repercussions for perpetrators, the fraudsters carry on, some apparently sure of being untouchable. Consider, for example, United States Attorney Tim Johnson's announcement in early September, 2009 that a former accounts supervisor for a Houston area chemicals company was charged with embezzling more than $3.6 million from her employer.

The suspected embezzler pleaded not guilty to wire fraud arising from a scheme she allegedly devised to steal more than $3.6 million from her employer, Kaneka Texas, a subsidiary of Kaneka Japan, a chemicals company. The indictment alleges that as an accounts supervisor with Kaneka, she was responsible for processing invoices submitted by Kaneka's vendors for payment and supposedly used that process to implement a scheme to have $3,621,220 from Kaneka's bank account wired to her own account at a Houston area bank from June 2006 through February 2008. Allegedly she used the embezzled money to buy a luxury home, luxury vehicles, and jewelry and to finance several gambling trips to Louisiana and Las Vegas.

The investigation leading to charges was conducted by the FBI and initiated in 2008 prompted by Kaneka's discovery of the embezzlement.

Since the FBI's announcement of the Kaneka theft, the print media have published several similar tales of employee...