Bradley Birkenfeld Case Summary

Bradley Birkenfeld role during the investigation of UBS reminded me of the story of Mark Whitacre, who deliberately blew the whistle against his former employer ADM. Likewise, both individuals cooperated with the federal authorities to dismantle fraud within their respective organizations. However, they remained the sole underachievers when investigations concluded and charged for obstructing the course of justice when several evidences disclosed that their testimonies incriminated just their employers, competitors or clients. Thus, Birkenfeld ethical journey unfortunately ended with his incarceration regardless the fact that the information he provided allowed the IRS to recover billions of dollars in back taxes and penalties involving 14,700 Americans who established offshore bank accounts to evade taxes. (Court & Sharman, 2009) Beside the whistleblower case discussed above, we also learned this week that the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) highlighted in the 2014 Global fraud study …show more content…
Additionally, the median duration of a fraud scheme was 18 months from the beginning until the discovery. Furthermore, 49% of the tips which permitted the detection of fraud involved employees who stood as whistleblowers against their organizations. Indeed, the banking and financial services held the first place with 17.8%, followed by the government and the public administration sector, which ranked second and also counted for 10.3% of the whole percentage. Finally, the lack of internal controls emerged as the weakness, which enabled fraud with an average loss per occurrence estimated at $80,000, $200,000, $355000 or $500,000 when respectively committed by one, two, three or four individuals (ACFE,