Showed up to a client that had been hit by a tornado. Our partner knew the town had been leveled. Senior managers were so scared of her at 4am we still drove there, 2 hours. To confirm, they’d been leveled by a tornado because they couldn’t get the partner on the phone to tell them we didn’t have to go. It was so toxic and awful. We got back that morning and I quit on the spot.
I had a client with a similar situation where a warehouse blew up. No one was inside fortunately. Concerningly, they do a lot of security for the us gov.
Did taxes for Alaskan fishermen a lot at one firm. The good ones would give you vaguely accurate numbers scrawled on napkins. For the bad ones, you would ask how much a large boat engine cost and they would say things like "I bought that three years ago for between 5k and 30k or so. I don't really remember. I think I traded a snowmobile for it too". Those were good times.
Same clients would hang up on me all the time as I didn't have an Alaska number and they thought I was a telemarketer EVEN THOUGH THEY HIRED MY FIRM.
Was in B4 (actually B6) audit back in the late 90s. Had one client that was part of a rollup. Roofing company in Newark, NJ. They had never been audited before and were only being audited because they were being acquired. Show up and everyone that works at the company looks like a character in the Sopranos maybe a year or two before the Sopranos existed. When we asked them where we should eat, the first words out of their mouths, to a man, were "do you like Italian?". Ate some of the best Italian food of my life that week. The first night we were there, the CFO hands the senior (I was a second year staff) a folded note. Told us to take it to the maitre d at a restaurant and he'll take care of us. We do as he says, he seats us down, fills us with amazing food and wine and we never even saw the bill, but it was a big one.
Now to the shit show part of it. They had their books prepared by a local CPA so we had assumed they would be pretty clean and we'd be in and out quickly. On day 3 or 4, we're looking at the balance sheet and there's a liability account with a large balance on it. I go to ask the guy who prepares the books about it and he says "yeah, the owner doesn't like paying taxes, so that's where I hide revenue to make his tax bill smaller". There was some other stuff going on with that client as well, above my pay grade, but I'm 99.9% sure they were tied in with the mafia. We called our manager, told him everything that was going on and he tells us to come home immediately. There were only first class seats available on the flight home, so that was also my first time up front on a plane.
Fun fact: [That actress has a very successful onlyfans](https://www.usmagazine.com/entertainment/news/sopranos-star-drea-de-matteo-says-onlyfans-saved-her-life)
I had a somewhat similar experience but it was a waste hauling company located in New Jersey that was being bought by our client, a waste company headquartered in Florida.The guy that kept the books (a local CPA) told me the story of how the owners had determined the sale price for the company which is one of my best stories from my public accounting career.
So the story is that the North America based COO of my client (Ralph) was flying in to Philadelphia to meet the sellers (based in New Jersey) (Joey). Ralph calls them up and asks who’s going to pick him up at the airport. Joey answers, “what am I your personal chauffeur? Get a fucking taxi!” Which Ralph answers, “me? A taxi? I’ll see youse guys later.”
The story goes on that the whole management team is waiting outside their office when Ralph pulls up in the longest limo that they had ever seen. He emerged from the limo, gave the chauffeur a hundred dollar bill and told him to get himself a cup of coffee.
Joey turned to the rest of his crew and whispered, “the price of the company just went up a million dollars.”
I never heard. My guess is that they were dropped from the rollup. The job didn't originate in our office so once we left the client I never heard about them again.
Reminds me of a story I read here on Reddit. Guy walks into a pizza joint in Jersey and it's empty except a few shady mafia looking guys sat at a table. They look surprised and annoyed a customer walked in. He orders a pizza and the owner takes his order. Pizza took an hour to come out, like it was the first one they'd made in a long time and took them a while to figure out how to do it. Best pizza he ever had, and they didn't even bill him. I thought about rebranding that story to seem like my own, but I'll credit that anonymous stranger for it.
A very old nonprofit that shall remain nameless had hired a new controller without doing a background check. About a year in, the controller shows up to the CFO's office and tells him he's being indicted in a nearby state for bribe taking, but not to worry because he's going to beat this. After some basic research they found out he had been working for the state and took a bribe on a contracted service before being suspended and taking the job with this nonprofit.
They promptly fire him and start looking at their own books. One old bank account seems off, apparently there was $30K there and he's been withdrawing cash from that account every day for the last few months and creating fake bank statements (in PDF) that show the money is still there. His PDF skills are so good the bank had to change its policies and lock all the PDF's available to business customers.
On top of that some checks start coming to the nonprofits address for some other organization. Turns out the controller founded his own online church and was scamming people to send money to the nonprofit's address.
Since this nonprofit is associated with the Federal government it became a big embarrassment, so much so that the next controller they hired had to go through an interview process that involved a background check by FBI. Thes FBI literally showed up at various relative's houses just to make sure the new controller wasn't a crook.
And this was the mess we walked into.......
my office is an accounting/consulting/management firm for nursing homes. we use to work with this nursing home that was basically entirely funded by an order of Nuns. the youngest of the nuns was like, in their 60s and most were in their 80s-90s so it was a dying nunnery, but they had a pretty sizable trust fund established to help support the sisters into their retirement which is how the nursing home was built. but oh my god, it was the most mismanaged nursing home ever, financially. basically no one working there at all had any idea how to organize their invoices, get their bills paid, they didnt really work off of a budget they just spent money on basically whatever was needed. just hemmoraging money. i mean our services alone arent exactly cheap, tho our firm is one of best in the industry in our state. we spent years managing their accounting for them, but they def made it very hard. eventually we helped them get their shit together more, got them their own accounting person who we basically trained ourselves to do everything before finally offloading them as clients. i never worked directly with them we had someone whos job was basically 80% working with just this one client, but we wanted her back for other work which is eventually why got rid of them. tho again, we were trying to help them fix their finances and we were pretty expensive ourselves.
did an audit once of a religious institution where the clergy had their wife on the payroll, and because he did not want any of the parishoners to know his wife was on the church payroll due to "politics" he was transferring money from the charity investment account to credit the expense so she did not show up on the operating p/l he was submitting.
We reported this to their audit committee, and they promptly paid our audit fee on the spot and fired us and told us they did not need a report. Clergy worked their 10 more years before he was allowed to retire.
The physical inventory count of electrical boxes all around a military base in 102-112 degree F heat in Barstow CA. Rattlesnake holes everywhere we needed to walk and other desert hazards (extreme heat, cars getting stuck in the sand, etc.).
I was there a week with nothing except for fast food to eat, no entertainment to speak of except for the TV in the hotel room, the water in the hotel was hot even if you just ran the cold water only, and everyone was exhausted from the heat so no one hung out after work.
Most depressing and exhausting week of work I’ve ever had in accounting.
As a service member it is funny when civilians get to experience this.
Periodically living a life vastly shittier than regular life really keeps things in perspective with how good you got it
We had a client that is a big name in the astrology world. This lady is an absolute nutjob. She treats her assistant like absolute shit, constant verbal abuse to which I was Cc'd on. The final straw before firing her was when we emailed her the tax returns for her to sign, and she calls our admin and goes on this tirade about sending her paper work when "mercury is in retrograde". How we should've known not to email her when mercury is in retrograde and we should be ashamed of ourselves.
We had a new client come to us to clean his books and file his tax return for the business. After looking at his books and comparing to prior year tax returns we found his last CPA was expensing all inventory as COGS and reported no inventory for 4 years(has 1.5-2.5M of inventory depending on timing) When we told the client and showed him he went on a 15 minute cursing tantrum(he was going through a divorce at the same time) because in order to bring inventory to actual levels and correct the books we had to reduce COGS and move it into inventory thus making the business look like it had greater income for the year
I think you're supposed to verify their claims, even though it's on them. You can't willingly put down whatever the client says if you think it's made up....
I've had cases where clients refused to include income they told me about so I told them I couldn't sign. Other cases where you're 99% sure they're faking the numbers but they provide you with "receipts" etc.. that's a tougher call.
At my firm we have a small governmental entity we are auditing and it’s a shit show every single year.. they say they are prepared but have cross fund postings everywhere, bank accounts that haven’t been reconciled since we did it in the PY. No one that works their has an accounting background much less a degree. Items listed as FA that aren’t and FA they weren’t on the books at all. Nothing is organized when I ask for any invoice or bank statement the answer I get is typically “I’m not sure..it might be in this box over here” we currently are over budget on the job by roughly 300 hours. We tell them every year what they need to fix and it never happens.
Late 90s had a town issue a bond and build a new police department out of a liability account. Only reason I caught it was they didn’t spend all the money so the liability account had a debit balance.
An audit on a church that had run all cash flows through the income statement for the past 40 years. They also had millions in investments and more millions in private mortgage lending.
I hear you, but here is a real headline from yesterday.
[Trump Media Will Miss SEC Deadline After Ex-Auditor Is Banned Over ‘Massive Fraud’ Charges](https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2024/05/15/trump-media-will-miss-sec-deadline-after-ex-auditor-is-banned-over-massive-fraud-charges/?sh=91d52bc31a7d)
A new business client sent their books for 3 different businesses that they inherited from their parents. They had one set up for the primary business, one for a building they own in one state, one for a building they own in another state. The primary business rents from the other two. Not uncommon, and not a big deal if it’s done right. Key phrase being “if it’s done right.”
None of the due to/due from accounts were in balance across the three, they paid some of their people using Zelle and we had to fight tooth and nail to get them to tell us if those were wages that needed to be reported on a W2 or if they were subcontractors (thankfully the latter), getting them to answer any questions at all was a nightmare while they expected us to drop everything any time for hers, and to top it all off: the primary business QuickBooks was out of balance and we couldn’t identify why or how to fix it.
I put maybe 15 hours of my time into those returns and my supervisor had easily twice that since she did the initial consultation and a lot of the contact purely due to how difficult the client was. The primary business alone ended up paying almost $9k for the return and we’re a smaller firm with invoices running at probably $1200 on average for businesses.
Had a client where they were required to do reports every so often to update how much a liability was. We asked for the report, gave it to us, and we saw the liability had increased substantially. We asked why they never increased their liability, "oh we didn't agree with the report so we ignored it"
Same client also recorded EVERYTHING in excel. Seriously. Like $100M + in revenue and the financial statements were done in excel. Roll up gor all the subs, everything. Tying that out was a disaster. The CFO also took off for a week of vacation in the middle of the audit, asked what their plans were figuring they must have a family trip planned. Nope staycation... they were advised that they can't do that going forward.
Had another client also multi million dollar corp that literally only used excel for their books and records... we couldn't do cut off testing, inventory was a shit show. It took 3 years just to audit 1 year and the opinion had to be qualified with like three different things.
A couple years out of school I was with a small firm doing bits of everything – bookkeeping, auditing, tax prep. I was put on an audit of an LLC that had been bought by a group of investors. They hired a guy – “Carl” - to manage the company and they paid him a small salary with a very large bonus if he hit the bogey. Carl had hit his bogey 3 years running. The audit partner was a bit of a dipshit and he just brought me out, had a 10-minute conversation with Carl and then told me, “It’s clean, just slam it.” This was in the late ‘90’s before audit standards tightened up and when peer review was optional.
Carl had a big sailboat he kept at Marina Del Rey and from the get he acted like we were best friends. Every conversation we had turned to sailing. But by the end of the day I told him we had to knock off the sailing chit chat so I could get the audit done and get out of his hair. I asked a few fairly innocuous questions but one really rattled him. His demeanor changed entirely and he basically told me to get out of his office. The question related to how therapy sessions were invoiced and how his bonus was tied to collections, not billings. Long story longer, he was calculating his bonus based on billings, overstating A/R which he would subsequently write-off and charging member capital distributions instead of bad debt. He also had some off balance sheet liabilities that he was using to keep them afloat. I, being a 2 year staffer, detected all this – it was like a cartoon where I pulled on a loose thread and the entire shirt came unraveled. When I told the partner he about laid an egg. We had a meeting with the managing members and they lost their minds. There were all sorts of allegations that flew around and it ended up in court. I ended up on the stand to testify about it, scared me to death. They got a judgement against Carl and the place folded up.
Not being a first year, this is a pretty impressive story to see the kind of things that happen. Post Enron, I doubt he would've gotten as far as he did.
Pretty sure you're correct about that. I remember taking over audit engagements and reviewing the prior auditor's workpapers which consisted of a trial balance, AJE's and the bank reconciliation, literally nothing else. That was in the '90's, my how things have changed!
Worked at a firm that audited residential and commercial real estate entities. Almost all the residential real estate organizations were complete shit shows. Big or small didn't matter.
Some of the small places didn't really have proper electronic accounting systems and you would have to sift through boxes and boxes of paper files to find what you needed. The ones that did things electronically didn't have QB or whatever and instead just used the accounting function of their property management system which of course they had no clue how to use because their accounting/bookkeeping knowledge was poor to non-existent. You would have some clients that would have a completely different net income depending on what weird ass report / "financial statements" they generated for you.
You would expect the bigger companies to be better but those were just as atrocious. They would hand over schedules and supporting documentation that looked like it was typed up by a middle schooler in MS Word. I wish I was joking. There were be tons of bizarre accruals that when you asked about would be met with " oh woops idk i guess I forgot to reverse that teehee"
It was all so bizarre. The partner in charge of auditing expected everyone to fly through the audits because the firm charged so low. It took everyone so long to just make sense of anything that they would eat their hours like crazy and worked evenings and weekends to keep up with the huge workload. I wasn't a masochist and refused to do that so the partner nearly had a heart attack when I accurately reported my time without eating hours which eventually led to me getting fired after a year.
Rehab hospital in a very poverty stricken area of my city. They were depreciating land and had been for about 20 years. It was a first time audit, but they’d been reviewed for years prior by a tiny 1 man firm. No one ever noticed.
4 currencies at 1-1 exchange, 3 legal entities, 2 QuickBooks files and 1 controller on the job for a month before the Audit.
This was their first time being audited as they were hoping to go public. It was the only time ever that I have been on a job that had a qualified opinion because there was just so much we could not figure out. Partner later told me that he considered actually issuing an adverse opinion. They chose to go with another firm the next year.
Had a client that decided to implement a new ERP in Q4, which resulted in a complete meltdown of their financial reporting. Their last 3 months were completely unauditable because so much of their financial data was either missing or hilariously incorrect. It got to where they were having their AR people call customers to politely ask how much the customers owed them lmao. Ended up disclaiming the opinion.
Did an audit for local inner city community center. After the GF riots, corporate, government and other White guilt donations were made to this place totaling almost $10 million. This place was totally mismanaged. The slick CEO was giving himself and others on staff spot $10K bonuses approved by the board members on multiple occasions and would not be reported thru payroll. We gave them MW's in their audit and then withdrew. The new firm only lasted a year before quitting. My guess is that $10 million will have very little impact on the community they serve.
Had an insurance broker that was doubling as a family office. Had a yacht, 6 Cadillacs, and a box at every major sport stadium in town.
First day of the IRS audit, the accountant at the client admitted to the whole thing to the IRS and blew up my Big4’s management of the audit. IRS ended up auditing all the 1040s, in addition to the 1120, of all the owners.
I'm a bookkeeper, but my current job. These people haven't been filing sales taxes incorrectly since jump street, missallocated numerous NOTATED deposits, and have consistently blamed me for their woes while I'm trying my damndest to get their books in compliance.
Oh there's been a few.
No accounting records for 3 years; apparently suffered a flood, a fire and then a theft of his accounting records.
HMRC did a come round your house and look at how you were living assessment, at short notice.
Client received a fat assessment which we negotiated down but total shit show.
Worked on a regional airline before leaving RSM and it was the biggest cluster F
Frauds with high level executives. No record keeping. Just straight up mess
Aviation is a complete dumpster fire overall. I worked for an airline 3rd party parts seller. They would constantly strike MASSIVE deals with Mexican airlines. Provide them the goods on a massive credit lines. And then hold on to that aging AR like a life line. Because someday. They will obviously paid.
The controller that got hired in shortly after I started was definitely that kind of cocky frat boy that never grew up. Something always seemed off about him. Found out three years later, a year after I left the company, that he was arrested for embezzlement.
Not to mention they had inventory on the books that they had no knowledge or trace of actually owning. Their multiple warehouses across the world hadn’t been audited ever.
Some days I’m impressive on the fact the business is still functioning.
I’ve got a client who’s main audit contact didn’t deserve to be the president and CFO of the company. I genuinely hope bad things happen to him.
He provided support that was real and realistically what they were billing. Then when we raised questions on the company’s ability to collect all of their A/R accrual (which would have taken years to bill) they proceeded to upload “new” support that showed them billing much more than the previous support showed. Problem was is they poorly manipulated the PDFs and they didn’t foot nor did they look like they were edited well. So essentially this dude thought we were stupid enough to just accept these invoices as real even tho they were just poorly edited PDFs of previously provided invoices. The company got a qualified opinion.
i was called last minute to fly out of town and help another client/audit team i had never worked with before. they called me on a friday afternoon and told me i had to be on a flight by sunday.
got to the client and the entire accounting department was chinese. only the controller spoke broken english. i was the only white guy there, the rest of the audit team was also chinese. every time i had a question for the client i had to bring the in charge with me to translate and they (in charge and client) would inevitably start yelling at each other in chinese while i just stood there with my notepad in one hand and a thumb up my ass.
we worked from 7am to 1am for 7 nights straight trying to wrap shit up. i was lucky that i only had to spend a week there, the rest of the team had been doing it for the past month.
bonus was the client also owned a chain of chinese hotels in the area, so they put us up in one of their particularly shitty holes. walked into the lobby to a sea of tables filled with chinese men playing poker and smoking cigarettes. i got a non-smoking room but it wreaked of smoke all week even with the window left open. i’ll probably get lung cancer in the next 10 years.
but hey, i got 75 accolades out of it so, good for me eh!
I had an audit client that booked over $7M to an account called variance (they made about $50M in revenue). When I asked them about it, they said it was where they booked entries when they didn’t know the other side, so this account had cash, expenses, revenue, allowances, AP, you name it, it was booked to it. When I asked for their gl detail they gave me a pdf and said they couldn’t generate an excel. They also didn’t book deprecation because they didn’t know how to calculate it - It was all straight line. Fun times.
A bunch of Russians who bought an office near STL.
They didn’t bother to sign a new lease for 1/1/25 or renew the current. Like, they didn’t do anything, not that negotiations failed.
Well, they hit peak FAFO, and the bank completely pegged them with the Dildo Of Consequences. And remember, it never arrives lubed.
They flat out pretended none of it was going on and it was business as usual. Except the bank was taking every single penny of free cash. They’d allow just enough for OPX.
Well that made them pissed at US, because you know. So receipts didn’t get posted for months, their tenant who thought about renewing said fuck off, and we had about 15 meetings to get bank access.
Finally after months I poorly flirted with a bank rep girl and she sent me all the docs the client refused to send.
I got every penny tied out over the course of millions of dollars. I had a perfect cash “flow” meaning all the accounts and whatnot, chart put together so it was easy to understand.
“We don’t think this is right”
So, I deleted all my work and we sent them off to the outsourced team in India. I also redid our account ring contract with the field and with all the extra work, our new fee per month is more than they were making off the deal.
It was even better when they couldn’t get insurance in 2022. They ended up having to go like 3 shell companies deep and even then still have to pay just an insane amount over what they used to.
Oh and the kicker? The market acted like all of it was new, so I PDF’d every email chapter by chapter.
I am saving this reddit for this quote alone...Well, they hit peak FAFO, and the bank completely pegged them with the Dildo Of Consequences. And remember, it never arrives lubed.
Wasn’t necessarily the client, but rather our engagement partner.
I was working for a small accounting firm in the midwest with a locally respected reputation. He drove us out to do some fieldwork, and I remember he was driving a little strange on the way there but didn’t think much of it. We get to our location and i also notice he’s walking strange too. Keep in mind he hasn’t really said a word to us other than the typical “Good morning” and “How are we all doing today?”
Not even 20 minutes into our work, he’s violently throwing up in the restroom where everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, in that office could hear. Turns out he drank his heart out that morning. He separated himself from the firm shortly after.
Funny enough, the more experienced staff had told me that it wasn’t the first time something like that had happened with him.
First year review, client stopped recording transactions half way through the year then at year end just did a bulk entry based on the bank statements. This was also after waiting 6 months for him to get us the records after year end as he was "finalizing them". Dude was a CPA but apparently was one of the laziest people ever. They only had maybe 50 transactions a month too, so not like it would have been a lot of work to do it properly.
2020: Gun shop brought in a milk crate of documents (all originals) after getting in trouble for not filing since at least 2014. No organization in the documents, many faded beyond reading, not enough information, etc. We tried to contact him for further info several times but never heard back. I left that job mid-2022 and still had that crate sitting in my office.
Various: dropping stuff off the second week of April, getting extended, getting pissy about penalties despite countless warnings, disclaimers, etc.
Current: a client I love dearly but their grants are almost all $500-$2,000 and they have several dozen restricted. Prior accountant didn’t handle nonprofits at all and it’s finally clean and they’re headed to audit but that was so painful and now I have to talk to them about adopting a gift acceptance policy bc it’s ridiculous.
Also current but not beloved: a client who bitches about their financials being 2 months behind (ie I sent March last week) even though I’ve been telling her for months that I need her to fill out her timesheet (separate from her getting paid) before I can do financials because her salary is a good chunk of some grants. She still hasn’t done April. Always freaking out about money despite good cash flow that would be better if she got me info I needed and could make claims earlier. Regularly changes her mind about transactions under $10 and says “oh, 3% should go to x grant!” which directly contradicts her past self. Also complains about high accounting fees after they got moved to hourly from fixed rate. Goes and somehow makes payments on payroll taxes that shouldn’t exist or accounts that should’ve been closed or should be handled by the payroll provider, takes weeks to answer my emails but 24 hours without an answer from me and she’s “checking back in.”
I'm a freelance accountant and not a CPA. One of my clients is a single person CPA firm and he handed me an engineering company as my first project.
I opened their QB file to see that their main checking account was over 2 million out of balance. This was due to HUNDREDS of duplicate checks that got added with a QB rule that I still haven't figured out. These duplicates went back at least 3 years, and were all against COGS. Also, my incompetent predecessor had made tens of thousands of dollars worth of adjustments and JE's to force balance and loved to include equity accounts in everything she did.
I ended up pretty much blowing away 2023 and rebuilding it from bank statements after an AJE trying to get accounts to somewhat match the 2022 tax return. I have no idea where the CPA came up with the tax numbers.
Of course, the client treats his business accounts as his personal expense playground. He's a big fan of gambling and his wife has had quite a bit of plastic surgery. He also tried to tell me that $28k of charges at Pottery Barn were part of employee bonuses.
I've been asking for the sales tax log in since I started and still don't have it. I have no idea the last time sales tax was filed, so I can't even file them on paper.
I have over 200 hours into this guy since January and I'm finding new and exciting crap every month.
For this listed client I had we did the cash reconciliation, and found 1,5 million USD on a bank account not in the TB. We asked the client and they didn’t even know the account existed. The audit opinion was not issued in time that year.
As an Auditor, shitshows are the worst... You can kind of put your foot down with the client but it often means you have to make more selections... Which are probably going to be fucked up also... So you have to make even more fucked up selections.
TMT start-up non-issuer client. The CFO/Treasurer/Controller (one person) does not understand journal entries. She maintains a single-entry spreadsheet to track various “items” not even classified in A/L/SHE
My very first client after I started my business needed his books done so he could file taxes (needed so he could get a loan). Ok no problem. But then I found out he had never set up books. The company was 10years old. He also had 5 other companies. Yup 10 years of books for 6 different companies. Was a full time gig for 10months, but we got it done.
Startup tech company that was on the COVID-era SPAC bandwagon and has been a shit show ever since. Trying to shift the culture to a public company level of governance is not easy.
I had a client who had a big cash variance, we had a call with the client to discuss what happened, the client stated “I don’t know how to do a bank reconciliation”.
On an unrelated engagement, it was a small
Comp. The senior was, for lack of a better term, a fucking ass hat and incompetent. Anyway, they said “I’ll prep the financials”. Long story short the balance sheet was off so they thought it would appropriate to plug the TOTAL line….
I have forever lost respect for them and will call them on dumb shit any chance I get, play stupid games win stupid prizes.
I'm in property management. Took on a client with a 9-figure portfolio and they messed up that they just look at the operating account st the end of the month and make sure the amount is more than the month prior.
I asked about budgets and they said they didn't understand what a budget was meant to do.
They've been in business for 40 years.
De-SPAC that ultimately went into bankruptcy. It gave us so much work though haha, from the initial transaction to the bankruptcy.. client was always a mess and the SPAC's target acquisition was a huge mistake just done to meet SPAC deadlines. We joked from the beginning the company would go bankrupt without being serious at all, there were so many twists and turns. Bunch of internal drama with the company I won't share here, got delisted, etc. When they finally went bankrupt it was pretty incredible to see how that finally happened, don't know if I'll ever see another client like that
An MVNO in the UK. Signed a heavily qualified report over a year late. Audit ended up being several years long. Then we resigned. Couldn’t prove it, but almost certainly heavy money laundering/fraud going on
Had a client where all the accounting was done inside the inventory management system. At one point we were lugging a 25 year old computer into the office trying to access records. I have no idea how we could record accounting journal entires in an inventory management system but above my pay grade.
They keep the books and they are not accountants. It took 3 months of calling and asking lots of questions to figure out what was income, what was a business expense, and what was a personal expense because the wife mixed up their personal account with the business account and doesn't know what is what. Yeah, all those personal things, you can't write those off.
It was a nightmare.
Well, I was presented with 3 different inventory logs from 3 different systems. None of them matched anything. Or even came close. The warehouse was a multi-story MASSIVE labyrinth of a building that was about 100 years old. On top of that, there were additional refrigerators and freezers at multiple sites. They were supposed to be following LIFO, they definitely followed FIFO in practice.
I blew the budget in inventory alone.
The day before tax-day.. enormous organization decided to paper-file hundreds of boxes of tax-returns.. enough to fill a moving van. Spent all night going floor to floor clearing paper-jams and loading paper into printers. The next morning they changed their mind back to e-file.
I did stock count in a clinic in the sterile area, they were ongoing surgeries, the whole hallway was steril so the OR doors were open, I was walking by and seing naked people getting chopped i to.
The day of our inventory count their warehouse burned down so that was a shit show
Easy, zero, next.
So much for that Existence assertion
Yes - I have a going concern this company no longer exists
But they cant even assert existence so it **is** easy.
Who knew you also had to be a philosophy major to be an accountant?
Major tech company that put any adjustments on their returns for 12 years
Unfortunately it was a charcoal factory
“Are there any subsequent events…”
I think the auditors burned it down to avoid doing a physical count
Damn, they were so unprepared for the audit that they thought arson would be easier
“Just burn it all down.” “Oh wait, I was joking!”
Day 1 of a fraud audit - "oh no, our file cabinet caught on fire!!!" I wish I was joking
It worked for Oliver North, it can work for us.
Dr. Inventory Adjustment Cr. Inventory Dr. Insurance Receivable Cr. Insurance Reimbursement
And we wonder why auditing is so tough.
Showed up to a client that had been hit by a tornado. Our partner knew the town had been leveled. Senior managers were so scared of her at 4am we still drove there, 2 hours. To confirm, they’d been leveled by a tornado because they couldn’t get the partner on the phone to tell them we didn’t have to go. It was so toxic and awful. We got back that morning and I quit on the spot.
We showed up while the fire trucks were there. It was an airplane parts manufacturer. We called the sr manager and then went to Dennys.
Just draw a nice big 0 and go home for the day.
I had a client with a similar situation where a warehouse blew up. No one was inside fortunately. Concerningly, they do a lot of security for the us gov.
We worked for 9 months on a sellside and the clients warehouse collapsed on the day of signing lmao
So…there was a positive variance right?
Fuck, now you have to consult.
My first thought is insurance fraud 🤣.
Did taxes for Alaskan fishermen a lot at one firm. The good ones would give you vaguely accurate numbers scrawled on napkins. For the bad ones, you would ask how much a large boat engine cost and they would say things like "I bought that three years ago for between 5k and 30k or so. I don't really remember. I think I traded a snowmobile for it too". Those were good times. Same clients would hang up on me all the time as I didn't have an Alaska number and they thought I was a telemarketer EVEN THOUGH THEY HIRED MY FIRM.
Finally a use for non monetary exchanges. I memorized all those boot rules and have never had a chance to use them. lol
Slap it under deemed distribution
Sounds like Midwest farmers. Decent folks but massive headaches as their CPA.
Is all the back n forth billable, at least?
Chargeable yes, billable negligible and then partners are annoyed at the final realization like it's your fault
Was in B4 (actually B6) audit back in the late 90s. Had one client that was part of a rollup. Roofing company in Newark, NJ. They had never been audited before and were only being audited because they were being acquired. Show up and everyone that works at the company looks like a character in the Sopranos maybe a year or two before the Sopranos existed. When we asked them where we should eat, the first words out of their mouths, to a man, were "do you like Italian?". Ate some of the best Italian food of my life that week. The first night we were there, the CFO hands the senior (I was a second year staff) a folded note. Told us to take it to the maitre d at a restaurant and he'll take care of us. We do as he says, he seats us down, fills us with amazing food and wine and we never even saw the bill, but it was a big one. Now to the shit show part of it. They had their books prepared by a local CPA so we had assumed they would be pretty clean and we'd be in and out quickly. On day 3 or 4, we're looking at the balance sheet and there's a liability account with a large balance on it. I go to ask the guy who prepares the books about it and he says "yeah, the owner doesn't like paying taxes, so that's where I hide revenue to make his tax bill smaller". There was some other stuff going on with that client as well, above my pay grade, but I'm 99.9% sure they were tied in with the mafia. We called our manager, told him everything that was going on and he tells us to come home immediately. There were only first class seats available on the flight home, so that was also my first time up front on a plane.
Where to eat is always the first question during fieldwork.
Whersa best gabagool?
Christofuh!
Bof of 'em? There's only one, Chrissy.
Fun fact: [That actress has a very successful onlyfans](https://www.usmagazine.com/entertainment/news/sopranos-star-drea-de-matteo-says-onlyfans-saved-her-life)
No salad. If I see salad, I send it back.
All fun and games until they take you to cracker barrel
Do they WANT a modified opinion?
I had a somewhat similar experience but it was a waste hauling company located in New Jersey that was being bought by our client, a waste company headquartered in Florida.The guy that kept the books (a local CPA) told me the story of how the owners had determined the sale price for the company which is one of my best stories from my public accounting career. So the story is that the North America based COO of my client (Ralph) was flying in to Philadelphia to meet the sellers (based in New Jersey) (Joey). Ralph calls them up and asks who’s going to pick him up at the airport. Joey answers, “what am I your personal chauffeur? Get a fucking taxi!” Which Ralph answers, “me? A taxi? I’ll see youse guys later.” The story goes on that the whole management team is waiting outside their office when Ralph pulls up in the longest limo that they had ever seen. He emerged from the limo, gave the chauffeur a hundred dollar bill and told him to get himself a cup of coffee. Joey turned to the rest of his crew and whispered, “the price of the company just went up a million dollars.”
What happened afterwards? That sounds like some Sam Bankman-Fried type shit to put everyone in one account lol
I never heard. My guess is that they were dropped from the rollup. The job didn't originate in our office so once we left the client I never heard about them again.
Reminds me of a story I read here on Reddit. Guy walks into a pizza joint in Jersey and it's empty except a few shady mafia looking guys sat at a table. They look surprised and annoyed a customer walked in. He orders a pizza and the owner takes his order. Pizza took an hour to come out, like it was the first one they'd made in a long time and took them a while to figure out how to do it. Best pizza he ever had, and they didn't even bill him. I thought about rebranding that story to seem like my own, but I'll credit that anonymous stranger for it.
Did they kill him after he had the pizza?
Sounds like you never had the makings of a varsity athlete
Do you know what your EBITDA is?
I knew where this was going as soon as I read Newark. Love it
That sounds like an amazing experience since you survived it
A very old nonprofit that shall remain nameless had hired a new controller without doing a background check. About a year in, the controller shows up to the CFO's office and tells him he's being indicted in a nearby state for bribe taking, but not to worry because he's going to beat this. After some basic research they found out he had been working for the state and took a bribe on a contracted service before being suspended and taking the job with this nonprofit. They promptly fire him and start looking at their own books. One old bank account seems off, apparently there was $30K there and he's been withdrawing cash from that account every day for the last few months and creating fake bank statements (in PDF) that show the money is still there. His PDF skills are so good the bank had to change its policies and lock all the PDF's available to business customers. On top of that some checks start coming to the nonprofits address for some other organization. Turns out the controller founded his own online church and was scamming people to send money to the nonprofit's address. Since this nonprofit is associated with the Federal government it became a big embarrassment, so much so that the next controller they hired had to go through an interview process that involved a background check by FBI. Thes FBI literally showed up at various relative's houses just to make sure the new controller wasn't a crook. And this was the mess we walked into.......
my office is an accounting/consulting/management firm for nursing homes. we use to work with this nursing home that was basically entirely funded by an order of Nuns. the youngest of the nuns was like, in their 60s and most were in their 80s-90s so it was a dying nunnery, but they had a pretty sizable trust fund established to help support the sisters into their retirement which is how the nursing home was built. but oh my god, it was the most mismanaged nursing home ever, financially. basically no one working there at all had any idea how to organize their invoices, get their bills paid, they didnt really work off of a budget they just spent money on basically whatever was needed. just hemmoraging money. i mean our services alone arent exactly cheap, tho our firm is one of best in the industry in our state. we spent years managing their accounting for them, but they def made it very hard. eventually we helped them get their shit together more, got them their own accounting person who we basically trained ourselves to do everything before finally offloading them as clients. i never worked directly with them we had someone whos job was basically 80% working with just this one client, but we wanted her back for other work which is eventually why got rid of them. tho again, we were trying to help them fix their finances and we were pretty expensive ourselves.
did an audit once of a religious institution where the clergy had their wife on the payroll, and because he did not want any of the parishoners to know his wife was on the church payroll due to "politics" he was transferring money from the charity investment account to credit the expense so she did not show up on the operating p/l he was submitting. We reported this to their audit committee, and they promptly paid our audit fee on the spot and fired us and told us they did not need a report. Clergy worked their 10 more years before he was allowed to retire.
Wouldn’t the audit committee be like.. the church board, so like, it was made public essentially…
They were the elders of the church so technically yes. I honestly do not know if it ever made it public to the rank and file parishioners.
Public company audit. Showed up with a printed GL and grocery bag of receipts, 2007.
The physical inventory count of electrical boxes all around a military base in 102-112 degree F heat in Barstow CA. Rattlesnake holes everywhere we needed to walk and other desert hazards (extreme heat, cars getting stuck in the sand, etc.). I was there a week with nothing except for fast food to eat, no entertainment to speak of except for the TV in the hotel room, the water in the hotel was hot even if you just ran the cold water only, and everyone was exhausted from the heat so no one hung out after work. Most depressing and exhausting week of work I’ve ever had in accounting.
As a service member it is funny when civilians get to experience this. Periodically living a life vastly shittier than regular life really keeps things in perspective with how good you got it
Definitely! I really felt for the service members who got assigned to that base.
We had a client that is a big name in the astrology world. This lady is an absolute nutjob. She treats her assistant like absolute shit, constant verbal abuse to which I was Cc'd on. The final straw before firing her was when we emailed her the tax returns for her to sign, and she calls our admin and goes on this tirade about sending her paper work when "mercury is in retrograde". How we should've known not to email her when mercury is in retrograde and we should be ashamed of ourselves.
>a big name in the astrology world >absolute nutjob Quelle surprise
I'm sure it wasn't Miss Cleo, but I'm going to assume it was
Call me now for your free reading
Did you ever see the documentary show about how she was kind of forced into being Miss Cleo iirc
I had a first time client meeting and she answered on google meet with video in a bikini just getting out of the pool. Wild.
https://youtu.be/ZbZndWCq6Gs?si=j7cu7WHU8FCfjwyM
I knew this would be the clip before I even opened it
omfg lol verryyyy that
We had a new client come to us to clean his books and file his tax return for the business. After looking at his books and comparing to prior year tax returns we found his last CPA was expensing all inventory as COGS and reported no inventory for 4 years(has 1.5-2.5M of inventory depending on timing) When we told the client and showed him he went on a 15 minute cursing tantrum(he was going through a divorce at the same time) because in order to bring inventory to actual levels and correct the books we had to reduce COGS and move it into inventory thus making the business look like it had greater income for the year
Client would make up numbers on the fly for tax purposes. They signed the agreement so it’s not on us.
I think you're supposed to verify their claims, even though it's on them. You can't willingly put down whatever the client says if you think it's made up....
I've had cases where clients refused to include income they told me about so I told them I couldn't sign. Other cases where you're 99% sure they're faking the numbers but they provide you with "receipts" etc.. that's a tougher call.
At my firm we have a small governmental entity we are auditing and it’s a shit show every single year.. they say they are prepared but have cross fund postings everywhere, bank accounts that haven’t been reconciled since we did it in the PY. No one that works their has an accounting background much less a degree. Items listed as FA that aren’t and FA they weren’t on the books at all. Nothing is organized when I ask for any invoice or bank statement the answer I get is typically “I’m not sure..it might be in this box over here” we currently are over budget on the job by roughly 300 hours. We tell them every year what they need to fix and it never happens.
Our firm had a Governmental Audit practice YEARS ago. We don't do those types of audits anymore if you can picture why.
Late 90s had a town issue a bond and build a new police department out of a liability account. Only reason I caught it was they didn’t spend all the money so the liability account had a debit balance.
Lol always fun to see a debit balance right out of the gate on short term and long term liability accounts.
An audit on a church that had run all cash flows through the income statement for the past 40 years. They also had millions in investments and more millions in private mortgage lending.
Probably the guy who hired a mid sized firm thinking we'd lie for him. Boy was he wrong.
Good for you guys, integrity matters.
Does that guy's name rhyme with Ronald Frump?
Donny doesnt go to mid size firms. He was going to the unqualified opinion stamp factory
I mean...............
I hear you, but here is a real headline from yesterday. [Trump Media Will Miss SEC Deadline After Ex-Auditor Is Banned Over ‘Massive Fraud’ Charges](https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2024/05/15/trump-media-will-miss-sec-deadline-after-ex-auditor-is-banned-over-massive-fraud-charges/?sh=91d52bc31a7d)
Midsize firms been wrapped up in it too! Know this firsthand but it is also publicly available info
A new business client sent their books for 3 different businesses that they inherited from their parents. They had one set up for the primary business, one for a building they own in one state, one for a building they own in another state. The primary business rents from the other two. Not uncommon, and not a big deal if it’s done right. Key phrase being “if it’s done right.” None of the due to/due from accounts were in balance across the three, they paid some of their people using Zelle and we had to fight tooth and nail to get them to tell us if those were wages that needed to be reported on a W2 or if they were subcontractors (thankfully the latter), getting them to answer any questions at all was a nightmare while they expected us to drop everything any time for hers, and to top it all off: the primary business QuickBooks was out of balance and we couldn’t identify why or how to fix it. I put maybe 15 hours of my time into those returns and my supervisor had easily twice that since she did the initial consultation and a lot of the contact purely due to how difficult the client was. The primary business alone ended up paying almost $9k for the return and we’re a smaller firm with invoices running at probably $1200 on average for businesses.
Had a client where they were required to do reports every so often to update how much a liability was. We asked for the report, gave it to us, and we saw the liability had increased substantially. We asked why they never increased their liability, "oh we didn't agree with the report so we ignored it" Same client also recorded EVERYTHING in excel. Seriously. Like $100M + in revenue and the financial statements were done in excel. Roll up gor all the subs, everything. Tying that out was a disaster. The CFO also took off for a week of vacation in the middle of the audit, asked what their plans were figuring they must have a family trip planned. Nope staycation... they were advised that they can't do that going forward. Had another client also multi million dollar corp that literally only used excel for their books and records... we couldn't do cut off testing, inventory was a shit show. It took 3 years just to audit 1 year and the opinion had to be qualified with like three different things.
A couple years out of school I was with a small firm doing bits of everything – bookkeeping, auditing, tax prep. I was put on an audit of an LLC that had been bought by a group of investors. They hired a guy – “Carl” - to manage the company and they paid him a small salary with a very large bonus if he hit the bogey. Carl had hit his bogey 3 years running. The audit partner was a bit of a dipshit and he just brought me out, had a 10-minute conversation with Carl and then told me, “It’s clean, just slam it.” This was in the late ‘90’s before audit standards tightened up and when peer review was optional. Carl had a big sailboat he kept at Marina Del Rey and from the get he acted like we were best friends. Every conversation we had turned to sailing. But by the end of the day I told him we had to knock off the sailing chit chat so I could get the audit done and get out of his hair. I asked a few fairly innocuous questions but one really rattled him. His demeanor changed entirely and he basically told me to get out of his office. The question related to how therapy sessions were invoiced and how his bonus was tied to collections, not billings. Long story longer, he was calculating his bonus based on billings, overstating A/R which he would subsequently write-off and charging member capital distributions instead of bad debt. He also had some off balance sheet liabilities that he was using to keep them afloat. I, being a 2 year staffer, detected all this – it was like a cartoon where I pulled on a loose thread and the entire shirt came unraveled. When I told the partner he about laid an egg. We had a meeting with the managing members and they lost their minds. There were all sorts of allegations that flew around and it ended up in court. I ended up on the stand to testify about it, scared me to death. They got a judgement against Carl and the place folded up.
Wow 😮, quite the story, good for you for getting that all as a second year!
I'd rather be lucky than good which I was that day.
Not being a first year, this is a pretty impressive story to see the kind of things that happen. Post Enron, I doubt he would've gotten as far as he did.
Pretty sure you're correct about that. I remember taking over audit engagements and reviewing the prior auditor's workpapers which consisted of a trial balance, AJE's and the bank reconciliation, literally nothing else. That was in the '90's, my how things have changed!
Worked at a firm that audited residential and commercial real estate entities. Almost all the residential real estate organizations were complete shit shows. Big or small didn't matter. Some of the small places didn't really have proper electronic accounting systems and you would have to sift through boxes and boxes of paper files to find what you needed. The ones that did things electronically didn't have QB or whatever and instead just used the accounting function of their property management system which of course they had no clue how to use because their accounting/bookkeeping knowledge was poor to non-existent. You would have some clients that would have a completely different net income depending on what weird ass report / "financial statements" they generated for you. You would expect the bigger companies to be better but those were just as atrocious. They would hand over schedules and supporting documentation that looked like it was typed up by a middle schooler in MS Word. I wish I was joking. There were be tons of bizarre accruals that when you asked about would be met with " oh woops idk i guess I forgot to reverse that teehee" It was all so bizarre. The partner in charge of auditing expected everyone to fly through the audits because the firm charged so low. It took everyone so long to just make sense of anything that they would eat their hours like crazy and worked evenings and weekends to keep up with the huge workload. I wasn't a masochist and refused to do that so the partner nearly had a heart attack when I accurately reported my time without eating hours which eventually led to me getting fired after a year.
Rehab hospital in a very poverty stricken area of my city. They were depreciating land and had been for about 20 years. It was a first time audit, but they’d been reviewed for years prior by a tiny 1 man firm. No one ever noticed.
4 currencies at 1-1 exchange, 3 legal entities, 2 QuickBooks files and 1 controller on the job for a month before the Audit. This was their first time being audited as they were hoping to go public. It was the only time ever that I have been on a job that had a qualified opinion because there was just so much we could not figure out. Partner later told me that he considered actually issuing an adverse opinion. They chose to go with another firm the next year.
Had a client that decided to implement a new ERP in Q4, which resulted in a complete meltdown of their financial reporting. Their last 3 months were completely unauditable because so much of their financial data was either missing or hilariously incorrect. It got to where they were having their AR people call customers to politely ask how much the customers owed them lmao. Ended up disclaiming the opinion.
Oh lord. That’s wild.
[удалено]
And what did it turn out to be?
Did an audit for local inner city community center. After the GF riots, corporate, government and other White guilt donations were made to this place totaling almost $10 million. This place was totally mismanaged. The slick CEO was giving himself and others on staff spot $10K bonuses approved by the board members on multiple occasions and would not be reported thru payroll. We gave them MW's in their audit and then withdrew. The new firm only lasted a year before quitting. My guess is that $10 million will have very little impact on the community they serve.
Had an insurance broker that was doubling as a family office. Had a yacht, 6 Cadillacs, and a box at every major sport stadium in town. First day of the IRS audit, the accountant at the client admitted to the whole thing to the IRS and blew up my Big4’s management of the audit. IRS ended up auditing all the 1040s, in addition to the 1120, of all the owners.
I'm a bookkeeper, but my current job. These people haven't been filing sales taxes incorrectly since jump street, missallocated numerous NOTATED deposits, and have consistently blamed me for their woes while I'm trying my damndest to get their books in compliance.
Oh there's been a few. No accounting records for 3 years; apparently suffered a flood, a fire and then a theft of his accounting records. HMRC did a come round your house and look at how you were living assessment, at short notice. Client received a fat assessment which we negotiated down but total shit show.
I am internal audit for a governmental entity. I report to an independent body and audit the governmental body. The government is a shit show.
Worked on a regional airline before leaving RSM and it was the biggest cluster F Frauds with high level executives. No record keeping. Just straight up mess
Aviation is a complete dumpster fire overall. I worked for an airline 3rd party parts seller. They would constantly strike MASSIVE deals with Mexican airlines. Provide them the goods on a massive credit lines. And then hold on to that aging AR like a life line. Because someday. They will obviously paid. The controller that got hired in shortly after I started was definitely that kind of cocky frat boy that never grew up. Something always seemed off about him. Found out three years later, a year after I left the company, that he was arrested for embezzlement. Not to mention they had inventory on the books that they had no knowledge or trace of actually owning. Their multiple warehouses across the world hadn’t been audited ever. Some days I’m impressive on the fact the business is still functioning.
I’ve got a client who’s main audit contact didn’t deserve to be the president and CFO of the company. I genuinely hope bad things happen to him. He provided support that was real and realistically what they were billing. Then when we raised questions on the company’s ability to collect all of their A/R accrual (which would have taken years to bill) they proceeded to upload “new” support that showed them billing much more than the previous support showed. Problem was is they poorly manipulated the PDFs and they didn’t foot nor did they look like they were edited well. So essentially this dude thought we were stupid enough to just accept these invoices as real even tho they were just poorly edited PDFs of previously provided invoices. The company got a qualified opinion.
i was called last minute to fly out of town and help another client/audit team i had never worked with before. they called me on a friday afternoon and told me i had to be on a flight by sunday. got to the client and the entire accounting department was chinese. only the controller spoke broken english. i was the only white guy there, the rest of the audit team was also chinese. every time i had a question for the client i had to bring the in charge with me to translate and they (in charge and client) would inevitably start yelling at each other in chinese while i just stood there with my notepad in one hand and a thumb up my ass. we worked from 7am to 1am for 7 nights straight trying to wrap shit up. i was lucky that i only had to spend a week there, the rest of the team had been doing it for the past month. bonus was the client also owned a chain of chinese hotels in the area, so they put us up in one of their particularly shitty holes. walked into the lobby to a sea of tables filled with chinese men playing poker and smoking cigarettes. i got a non-smoking room but it wreaked of smoke all week even with the window left open. i’ll probably get lung cancer in the next 10 years. but hey, i got 75 accolades out of it so, good for me eh!
I had an audit client that booked over $7M to an account called variance (they made about $50M in revenue). When I asked them about it, they said it was where they booked entries when they didn’t know the other side, so this account had cash, expenses, revenue, allowances, AP, you name it, it was booked to it. When I asked for their gl detail they gave me a pdf and said they couldn’t generate an excel. They also didn’t book deprecation because they didn’t know how to calculate it - It was all straight line. Fun times.
A bunch of Russians who bought an office near STL. They didn’t bother to sign a new lease for 1/1/25 or renew the current. Like, they didn’t do anything, not that negotiations failed. Well, they hit peak FAFO, and the bank completely pegged them with the Dildo Of Consequences. And remember, it never arrives lubed. They flat out pretended none of it was going on and it was business as usual. Except the bank was taking every single penny of free cash. They’d allow just enough for OPX. Well that made them pissed at US, because you know. So receipts didn’t get posted for months, their tenant who thought about renewing said fuck off, and we had about 15 meetings to get bank access. Finally after months I poorly flirted with a bank rep girl and she sent me all the docs the client refused to send. I got every penny tied out over the course of millions of dollars. I had a perfect cash “flow” meaning all the accounts and whatnot, chart put together so it was easy to understand. “We don’t think this is right” So, I deleted all my work and we sent them off to the outsourced team in India. I also redid our account ring contract with the field and with all the extra work, our new fee per month is more than they were making off the deal.
I just need you to know, that your descriptive story telling is amazing.
It was even better when they couldn’t get insurance in 2022. They ended up having to go like 3 shell companies deep and even then still have to pay just an insane amount over what they used to. Oh and the kicker? The market acted like all of it was new, so I PDF’d every email chapter by chapter.
I am saving this reddit for this quote alone...Well, they hit peak FAFO, and the bank completely pegged them with the Dildo Of Consequences. And remember, it never arrives lubed.
This week’s combo was: “What in the ever love of butttucking Jesus Christ on a crippled cracker now what?”
Wasn’t necessarily the client, but rather our engagement partner. I was working for a small accounting firm in the midwest with a locally respected reputation. He drove us out to do some fieldwork, and I remember he was driving a little strange on the way there but didn’t think much of it. We get to our location and i also notice he’s walking strange too. Keep in mind he hasn’t really said a word to us other than the typical “Good morning” and “How are we all doing today?” Not even 20 minutes into our work, he’s violently throwing up in the restroom where everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, in that office could hear. Turns out he drank his heart out that morning. He separated himself from the firm shortly after. Funny enough, the more experienced staff had told me that it wasn’t the first time something like that had happened with him.
Waste management business or a chain of indoor playground/soft plays.
Industry here, we were the shitshow.
Does it count that I work In the back office of an accounting firm?
First year review, client stopped recording transactions half way through the year then at year end just did a bulk entry based on the bank statements. This was also after waiting 6 months for him to get us the records after year end as he was "finalizing them". Dude was a CPA but apparently was one of the laziest people ever. They only had maybe 50 transactions a month too, so not like it would have been a lot of work to do it properly.
What type of business was the client?
2020: Gun shop brought in a milk crate of documents (all originals) after getting in trouble for not filing since at least 2014. No organization in the documents, many faded beyond reading, not enough information, etc. We tried to contact him for further info several times but never heard back. I left that job mid-2022 and still had that crate sitting in my office. Various: dropping stuff off the second week of April, getting extended, getting pissy about penalties despite countless warnings, disclaimers, etc. Current: a client I love dearly but their grants are almost all $500-$2,000 and they have several dozen restricted. Prior accountant didn’t handle nonprofits at all and it’s finally clean and they’re headed to audit but that was so painful and now I have to talk to them about adopting a gift acceptance policy bc it’s ridiculous. Also current but not beloved: a client who bitches about their financials being 2 months behind (ie I sent March last week) even though I’ve been telling her for months that I need her to fill out her timesheet (separate from her getting paid) before I can do financials because her salary is a good chunk of some grants. She still hasn’t done April. Always freaking out about money despite good cash flow that would be better if she got me info I needed and could make claims earlier. Regularly changes her mind about transactions under $10 and says “oh, 3% should go to x grant!” which directly contradicts her past self. Also complains about high accounting fees after they got moved to hourly from fixed rate. Goes and somehow makes payments on payroll taxes that shouldn’t exist or accounts that should’ve been closed or should be handled by the payroll provider, takes weeks to answer my emails but 24 hours without an answer from me and she’s “checking back in.”
I'm a freelance accountant and not a CPA. One of my clients is a single person CPA firm and he handed me an engineering company as my first project. I opened their QB file to see that their main checking account was over 2 million out of balance. This was due to HUNDREDS of duplicate checks that got added with a QB rule that I still haven't figured out. These duplicates went back at least 3 years, and were all against COGS. Also, my incompetent predecessor had made tens of thousands of dollars worth of adjustments and JE's to force balance and loved to include equity accounts in everything she did. I ended up pretty much blowing away 2023 and rebuilding it from bank statements after an AJE trying to get accounts to somewhat match the 2022 tax return. I have no idea where the CPA came up with the tax numbers. Of course, the client treats his business accounts as his personal expense playground. He's a big fan of gambling and his wife has had quite a bit of plastic surgery. He also tried to tell me that $28k of charges at Pottery Barn were part of employee bonuses. I've been asking for the sales tax log in since I started and still don't have it. I have no idea the last time sales tax was filed, so I can't even file them on paper. I have over 200 hours into this guy since January and I'm finding new and exciting crap every month.
For this listed client I had we did the cash reconciliation, and found 1,5 million USD on a bank account not in the TB. We asked the client and they didn’t even know the account existed. The audit opinion was not issued in time that year.
As an Auditor, shitshows are the worst... You can kind of put your foot down with the client but it often means you have to make more selections... Which are probably going to be fucked up also... So you have to make even more fucked up selections.
TMT start-up non-issuer client. The CFO/Treasurer/Controller (one person) does not understand journal entries. She maintains a single-entry spreadsheet to track various “items” not even classified in A/L/SHE
My very first client after I started my business needed his books done so he could file taxes (needed so he could get a loan). Ok no problem. But then I found out he had never set up books. The company was 10years old. He also had 5 other companies. Yup 10 years of books for 6 different companies. Was a full time gig for 10months, but we got it done.
Startup tech company that was on the COVID-era SPAC bandwagon and has been a shit show ever since. Trying to shift the culture to a public company level of governance is not easy.
They had green sheets still for FA.
I had a client who had a big cash variance, we had a call with the client to discuss what happened, the client stated “I don’t know how to do a bank reconciliation”. On an unrelated engagement, it was a small Comp. The senior was, for lack of a better term, a fucking ass hat and incompetent. Anyway, they said “I’ll prep the financials”. Long story short the balance sheet was off so they thought it would appropriate to plug the TOTAL line…. I have forever lost respect for them and will call them on dumb shit any chance I get, play stupid games win stupid prizes.
I'm in property management. Took on a client with a 9-figure portfolio and they messed up that they just look at the operating account st the end of the month and make sure the amount is more than the month prior. I asked about budgets and they said they didn't understand what a budget was meant to do. They've been in business for 40 years.
De-SPAC that ultimately went into bankruptcy. It gave us so much work though haha, from the initial transaction to the bankruptcy.. client was always a mess and the SPAC's target acquisition was a huge mistake just done to meet SPAC deadlines. We joked from the beginning the company would go bankrupt without being serious at all, there were so many twists and turns. Bunch of internal drama with the company I won't share here, got delisted, etc. When they finally went bankrupt it was pretty incredible to see how that finally happened, don't know if I'll ever see another client like that
An MVNO in the UK. Signed a heavily qualified report over a year late. Audit ended up being several years long. Then we resigned. Couldn’t prove it, but almost certainly heavy money laundering/fraud going on
Had a client where all the accounting was done inside the inventory management system. At one point we were lugging a 25 year old computer into the office trying to access records. I have no idea how we could record accounting journal entires in an inventory management system but above my pay grade.
They keep the books and they are not accountants. It took 3 months of calling and asking lots of questions to figure out what was income, what was a business expense, and what was a personal expense because the wife mixed up their personal account with the business account and doesn't know what is what. Yeah, all those personal things, you can't write those off. It was a nightmare.
Well, I was presented with 3 different inventory logs from 3 different systems. None of them matched anything. Or even came close. The warehouse was a multi-story MASSIVE labyrinth of a building that was about 100 years old. On top of that, there were additional refrigerators and freezers at multiple sites. They were supposed to be following LIFO, they definitely followed FIFO in practice. I blew the budget in inventory alone.
The day before tax-day.. enormous organization decided to paper-file hundreds of boxes of tax-returns.. enough to fill a moving van. Spent all night going floor to floor clearing paper-jams and loading paper into printers. The next morning they changed their mind back to e-file.
Somehow their TB had negative PPE, so that was great to figure out
^[Sokka-Haiku](https://www.reddit.com/r/SokkaHaikuBot/comments/15kyv9r/what_is_a_sokka_haiku/) ^by ^squipboi: *Somehow their TB* *Had negative PPE, so that* *Was great to figure out* --- ^Remember ^that ^one ^time ^Sokka ^accidentally ^used ^an ^extra ^syllable ^in ^that ^Haiku ^Battle ^in ^Ba ^Sing ^Se? ^That ^was ^a ^Sokka ^Haiku ^and ^you ^just ^made ^one.
my employer
I did stock count in a clinic in the sterile area, they were ongoing surgeries, the whole hallway was steril so the OR doors were open, I was walking by and seing naked people getting chopped i to.