Episode 100: Fraud Against Family with Tiffany Couch, CPA, CFF, CFE
In this season of The Data Sleuth Podcast, titled "From Numbers to Narratives," guest host Justin Burns, tackles topics including FBI Investigations, Anti-Money Laundering, Family Fraud, IRS Investigations, and more. In each episode, Justin is joined by an industry expert to help tell the story behind the numbers and explore the latest in fraud detection and prevention.
In our 100th episode today, we discuss Fraud Against Family with Tiffany Couch, CPA, CFF, CFE. In this episode, Leah and Tiffany discuss:
· What a forensic accountant does, especially in family disputes
· Common ways family members defraud each other
· Motivations behind defrauding family members
· How families—especially aging or blended ones—can protect themselves
GUEST BIO
Tiffany Couch is CEO/Founder at Acuity Forensics, a nationally recognized forensic accounting firm based in the Pacific Northwest. She has more than 28 years of experience in the field of accounting with the last 20 years focused on forensic accounting engagements. Her expertise is in matters involving fraud investigation, forensic accounting, contract and regulatory compliance, internal control risk assessment, and complex litigation. Professional background and experience include audit, tax, and business consulting services for nonprofit, government, and privately held business entities in a range of industries.
She has provided expertise as a source to the New York Times, Forbes, CNBC, NPR, and the Wall Street Journal. She is also a regular contributor to multiple industry publications and has been interviewed by regional, national and international broadcast news stations. Ms. Couch is the winner of the 2014 James R. Baker Speaker of the Year, presented by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) to honor an individual who has demonstrated the true spirit of leadership in communication, presentation, and quality instruction. She also serves as a faculty member for the ACFE. With almost 75,000 members worldwide, the ACFE is the world’s largest anti-fraud organization and the premier provider of anti-fraud training and education.
Tiffany is the author of The Thief in Your Company, available at Amazon.com and other online retailers.
Email: tcouch@acuityforensics.com
LinkedIn: Tiffany Couch, CPA, CFF, CFE
RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY’S EPISODE
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CONNECT WITH JUSTIN BURNS, CPA, CFE
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Transcript
Leah Wietholter:
Hi, I'm Leah Wietholter, and this is the Data Sleuth Podcast. In this season of the Data Sleuth Podcast, From Numbers to Narratives, our host, Justin Burns, the director of operations for Workman Forensics, discusses a broad range of forensic accounting cases, from the government, to money laundering, fraud against family members, and so much more. In each episode, he's joined by an industry expert to help tell the story behind the numbers.
Justin Burns:
Thank you, Leah. I'm Justin Burns, and I'll be your host for this season of the Data Sleuth Podcast, From Numbers to Narratives. Together with some amazing guests, we'll take you beyond the spreadsheets and into the human side of fraud investigations. Let's dive in to today's episode.
Leah Wietholter:
Well, can you believe it? The Data Sleuth Podcast made it to 100 episodes, 100 full length episodes. Thank you so much for listening and downloading. I hope these have been educational for you and as much fun for you as it has been for us to record. The team was so kind to invite me back to host the 100th episode this season, and who better to have on the podcast than one of our original guests, Tiffany Couch? Today, Tiffany and I talk about fraud against family. She's currently working on a book in this topic and in this area. So today we talk about what a forensic accountant does in family disputes, we talk about common ways family members defraud each other, motivations, that rationalization piece behind defrauding family members, and then also how can our aging family members protect themselves and things to think about and ways that you can take action as an individual to help protect yourself and also your loved ones.
Before we get into our conversation, let me tell you just a little bit about Tiffany. Tiffany is a friend of the podcast, she is well known in our community. If you haven't met her, you should. Tiffany Couch is Acuity Forensics CEO and founder and principal. She has more than 27 years of experience in the field of accounting, with the last 18 years spent directly involved in forensic accounting engagements. Her expertise is in matters involving fraud investigation, forensic accounting, contract, regulatory compliance, internal control, risk assessment, and complex litigation. I hope you enjoy this episode of my conversation with Tiffany Couch. Well, hi Tiffany. Thanks so much for joining me today.
Tiffany Couch:
Thanks for having me on.
Leah Wietholter:
Yeah, so you have a wealth of experience in forensic accounting and fraud investigation, and then you are the author of one of our favorite books, The Thief in Your Company. But I've heard that you may have another book coming out soon, and what is this one about?
Tiffany Couch:
The new book is called The Thief in Your Family, and it stems from my 18, 20 years as a forensic accountant dealing with theft within families, which is particularly difficult for people, and my hope is that we can avoid having that happen to more people
Leah Wietholter:
Yeah, as we look at the increasing risk of fraud within families, especially as our elders live longer, I would like to focus on how family members may defraud each other. I see that this could be kind of an uncomfortable topic for some, but I want to just do it anyway. Let's just discuss it and help identify potential risks in our own families. Obviously, you'll have some stories, I'm sure I'll have some stories, but I'd like to talk about it from the potential risk in order to help people prevent it or to maybe think ahead and to plan accordingly.
Tiffany Couch:
Certainly. About 10 years ago, I had a New York Times writer call me, and she wanted to interview me about theft in rich families, families with a lot of wealth, and what happens to them. I told her, "I think you're writing the wrong story because if there's money in a family, even if somebody's only living on social security, there's money to steal." So the risk, in my professional experience, it doesn't matter whether you have a very modest income or whether you've accumulated a lot of wealth in your lifetime, every family is at risk.
Leah Wietholter:
Yes, for sure. It's at all levels. I'm sure you get inquiries all the time. I mean, unfortunately we can't help all the inquiries.
Tiffany Couch:
We cannot.
Leah Wietholter:
But yes, it's not just specific to wealthy families. It can be-
Tiffany Couch:
Any family.
Leah Wietholter:
...any family.
Tiffany Couch:
It's interesting, when I tell people, "Oh, I'm writing this book," they want to tell me about what happened in their family. It's sort of this taboo subject where people are embarrassed that it's happened, nobody wants to publicize their dirty laundry, but it is literally something where every family, whether it's happened to them in their unit or in an extended family's life, it happens and it happens more regularly than I think we really know.
Leah Wietholter:
Yes. So let's back up just a little bit. Can you explain what a forensic accountant does in the context of family disputes?
Tiffany Couch:
I always like to say I'm a non-traditional accountant. I'm a CPA, but I'm not doing taxes or audits. I investigate white collar crime, I defend people who are accused of white collar crime, and I try and figure out what happened to the money. That's a big part of what I do. I also do litigation and damages calculations, but I would say 60% of what I do is investigate fraud or defend people accused of defrauding another person. That's what a forensic accountant does in general. When it comes to families, it's very similar to a business, I'm trying to figure out how much income is coming into this person or to these people, what are their normal and customary expenses, and how has that changed or has that changed particularly since somebody has maybe come online as the personal representative or the power of attorney?
Leah Wietholter:
Yeah. What first got you interested in investigating this financial fraud within families?
Tiffany Couch:
One of my first cases when I opened my business 18 years ago was a lawyer here in town who said, "Hey, I've got a situation with this family, a very modest family." The dad had been a janitor at a school for 30 years, had retired as that. The mom had been a stay-at-home mom. She had taken on jobs as they needed maybe a new dishwasher or something like that, but a very traditional, very modest family. Mom had started getting sick, and soon after that, dad had gotten sick. They had two sons. One son is what I would call the son who launched, the son who went out, got a job, had a nice family, had a wife, all of those things. Then they had the son who had more trouble during his life, and that son moved into the house with mom and dad to take care of mom and dad.
Right soon after, I could see, just for example, they got Dish Network, they started eating out all of the time, there were all of these expenditures at bars. Then all of a sudden you could see that all of the home, the land, because they did live on a nice piece of property, it had all gotten signed over to the sun. So it wasn't even I got interested in it. I got a call, "Can you do this?" I investigated it and we found that this son had absolutely benefited significantly from mom and dad's money and assets and had attempted to sign over all of the assets to himself.
Leah Wietholter:
Yeah. I just can't even tell you how many times I've heard this story with our clients. I like how you said it, there was the son that launched and the one that didn't.
Tiffany Couch:
Tell me, I'm sure I'm not the only one, one of the chapters in my book, it actually happened in my own family too, but I see this over and over again where sometimes mom and dad make the personal representative, or the POA, the child that maybe had more problems in their life. It is something that as a parent, I'm like, is it because they wanted that person to feel more special or still feel loved? What is the dynamic that's causing them to do that?
Leah Wietholter:
In one of the cases I'm thinking of, they had a lot of land. A lot of my work is in Oklahoma, so there was a lot of land to divide up. Dad had passed away, mom was still living, and the son that never... I mean, I think they had seven or eight kids, and the son that never went out and had a career, he'd always just worked on the ranch, now he's taking care of mom. He started carving out, this is what I would call it, he started carving out his part of the inheritance. It was the most prime land, it was the most valuable part of the ranch. He got to take the cattle that he wanted early on, but it was perceived that he was getting to do this because he was the favorite even, which I just find so interesting because it wasn't the son who was my client who had made this whole life and his own wealth for himself, it was the kid that had stayed home that got to benefit from all these things.
Tiffany Couch:
It's interesting that you use the word favorite. The other part, the other thing I'm writing about, is how many times I've walked into a trial or a deposition or gone into a meeting and what I'm hearing. My favorite story are these two brothers, we walked into a mediation, and they are 60-year-old men at this point, and they were talking about how mom bought one of them a bike when one of them was 10 and she didn't buy the other one a bike when he was 10. They were literally still upset about what happened when they were kids and that followed them all the way through 50 years later. Mom thought he was the favorite, and no, mom thought he was the favorite. That is another dynamic that is so interesting to me.
Leah Wietholter:
Yes, and once somebody does something, I mean, I think it causes suspicion overall within the family. There's this suspicion, but then at the same time, I feel like there's this, well, but it's my brother, he'd never do that to me, or that's my sister.
Tiffany Couch:
He would never do that. We think about people with titles, and we see this in businesses, we see this, this person would never do this to me. That's what my first book is about, it's always the person that you least expect. But when a person holds a title within a family, mother, brother, aunt, uncle, grandma, etc, we hold those titles a lot of times with a higher esteem and belief because we would never do that to our mother, we would never do that to our sister, we would never do that to our grandma. The nice people let these things go on for a little bit longer, or sometimes a lot longer, because they're rationalizing, I'm going to be the bad person if I think my wonderful sister Leah is doing this to me.
Leah Wietholter:
Right. What are some of the common ways family members defraud each other?
Tiffany Couch:
The most common and the easiest to figure out is that the person simply starts either paying their own personal bills through the vulnerable adult's accounts, or they just simply write checks to themselves or transfer money to themselves. It's the most common and the easiest to find because it's right there in the bank statements, or for example, in the credit card statements because somebody's using that credit card for all of their personal spending. It's a number one thing that we see.
The others are, oh, I divert the social security, I divert the pension payments, I divert the 401k payments to a different account under my control. Really understanding what income that vulnerable adult has and verifying that it comes into the right bank accounts is really crucial. I have a client, just got done with this case, very, very wealthy man, but one of the things that would happen is he would get haphazard payments from oil and gas companies or from dividends from his stock holdings. We were only able to figure out that that money came in because we looked at the 1099s at the end of the year or the tax returns, and we were like, oh, well, where are these dividends? Where's these gas and oil funds going? So that's the second one, diverting the income into accounts held by somebody else or in somebody else's control.
Then the third would be signing over or getting access to assets. You described the carving out of the land, I described that first case where son basically signed the deeds over to himself. I have seen this over and over again where we go and we ask for example for the bank documents, the bank signature documents. What do we find? Oh, mom and dad are vulnerable, all of a sudden this person has signed over themselves as either power of attorney or payable on death on the accounts. They've signed over all of the investment accounts to themselves. They've gone and gotten a lawyer and changed the deeds on the house or other properties. Signing over those assets so that when that person dies it comes to them is also very, very common, and a lot of times I see all three happening at the same time.
Leah Wietholter:
Oh sure, because this person has access to everything usually.
Tiffany Couch:
And they deserve it. They deserve it. They say, "Well, I'm here taking care of mom and dad. It's so hard," or "Grandma and grandpa, and it's so hard to do, or "I was the favorite," or "They gave my brother a down payment for his house and they didn't give it to me, and so I'm taking my inheritance." I've actually heard that as a defense, "I was just taking my inheritance early." All of those rationalizations come into play.
Leah Wietholter:
Yeah. This also reminds me of just some of the difficult areas that we get into with clients, I think this would fit into your category number one, when the caretaker or POA, personal representative, they're buying groceries for mom, or maybe they like to order their toilet paper off of Amazon or whatever, and so then all of a sudden you see all these charges to Amazon that weren't there before when mom was taking care of her account or groceries increased significantly, or as you mentioned in your example, they start going out to eat all the time. Well, usually the clients, which are the siblings, they are so mad because they're saying, "Look at all these Amazon charges." But the difficulty for you and me is getting down into, okay, but who benefited from-
Tiffany Couch:
The toilet paper?
Leah Wietholter:
...these things? I'm guessing you've run into this as well.
Tiffany Couch:
Oh, yes. Then the decision becomes, well, if it's Amazon, that's great. We can go and get all of those receipts, somebody can download them and we can go figure it out. It becomes a cost-benefit situation. But certainly if somebody, for example, lives with mom or dad or grandma and grandpa, well they are using the toilet paper, they are eating the groceries. So there does become some sort of professional judgment there where you've got to assume or make some judgment calls about some of those expenditures, and especially if that person's, for example, not getting paid to take care of mom and dad.
So yes, oh yes, always an issue. Especially in our older population, I still have clients, older, vulnerable adults who always went to the bank on Friday, wrote a check to cash, they took their little cash out of the account and that's what they lived on all week. They never had a debit card, they never used a credit card. Now we have the caretaker who's using the debit card and using the credit card, and you have to analyze, well, are they spending more than that cash that was taken out every Friday, kind of thing.
Leah Wietholter:
It's always such an interesting dynamic too when, I don't know about you, but several of these caretakers, who are children of the vulnerable adult, so many of the cases I've investigated they've actually quit their job to be the caretaker, and so they're living with mom or dad. All the siblings are saying, "Wait, that's not what we envisioned. This is not what we agreed upon." Well, then that sets up an expectation, an entitlement for the caretaker that says, "Well, I gave up my job to come take care of mom, so shouldn't I be able to order my craft supplies off of Amazon?" That was a real case.
Tiffany Couch:
Yeah. I sold my house to take care of mom. Shouldn't I be able to upgrade mom and dad's house to my liking if I'm going to live here?
Leah Wietholter:
Right, all of these things. Let's take a quick break.
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All right, shifting focus just a little bit, how does fraud differ in family-owned businesses versus personal family finances?
Tiffany Couch:
So in a family-owned business, all of those relationships are still there. But remember, instead of a normal employer-employee relationship, we now have lifetime relationships. Whether it's son working for mom and dad or nephews working for the grandparents or whatever, we now have these lifetime relationships happening. So we get the, "Well, they made him president, I'm better suited to be president." So now we've got those same things you and I talked about, but now it's related to how those employment-related decisions are occurring. Then we now have what I typically see, is that entitlement issue. Well, the business is going to be mine anyway, I'm going to give myself that raise. I'm going to write checks to myself to benefit myself. It's that entitlement of, well, mom and dad always use the company credit card to go on their vacations, I'm going to do the same thing.
So those things happen, and in my experience, the fraud happens for a longer time for exactly the reason you mentioned earlier, which was, my brother would never do that, my sister would never do that, or my daughter would never do that. I've seen that so many times where they knew, and it's normal in every fraud case, everybody gets that gut feeling that they push down and they think something's wrong with them for thinking badly about this person. It's even worse in a family because how dare I think that my wonderful sister would do that, or my brother, etc, or my daughter? People will bury their head in the sand and go into ostrich mode for a lot longer, and unfortunately, what that causes is for the fraud to go on longer and for the losses to be bigger. So yeah, it's a tough one.
Leah Wietholter:
You talking about this reminded me of a case where... There's just so many interesting things in the family business, because yes, dad started off doing it a certain way to avoid paying taxes on certain things. Then they do have a board, but it's of all family members, so they're just going to keep doing things like dad did it and who's going to argue with dad? He made this so successful. Dad would go out and purchase more equipment, or again, in Oklahoma, more land, build more buildings, things like that. But then whenever the children take over, it seems like there's always one or a couple that just didn't stay with the business. They went off, they had their own life, but Dad made sure that they were going to get some sort of distribution just like everybody else. So there is this entitlement and opportunity, if we're looking at the fraud triangle, there is this opportunity for the siblings to just make sure there's nothing left over to distribute.
Tiffany Couch:
I worked in the business. Why should my sister get anything? She's over there having a nice life with her husband or her family. Why should my sister get anything when I worked this business and grew it with dad?
Leah Wietholter:
Right, and then the sister that was left out, it got to a certain point when she realized, oh, I'm being completely cut out, because the business fed into the trust and then the trust was now going to everybody's kids, but she didn't have kids, and so she was getting edged out because of all these business deals. For years she's just like, nevermind, it's all right, it's all right. But then when she sees she's being completely cut out, then she's like, okay, I think I have to do something about this. But then she's having to weigh, how public am I going to make this in my really small town where we're the biggest business?
Tiffany Couch:
Yeah, it's a thing. It is a concern.
Leah Wietholter:
Then she hires really great attorneys, and we end up working with her for a while. Then the more she saw, I mean, you would be mad if this was your employee or some other relationship, but when it's your family.
Tiffany Couch:
It's the worst, and then it messes up everything. What are we going to do for Christmas? What are we going to do for Thanksgiving? We always get together on Easter. Father's Day is ruined. I mean, it is far more devastating in those areas. What about the grandkids? It is all of those things that she's probably got to worry about, not just are they taking money from me. But I get it, I grew up in a small town. What is everybody going to think? I don't want to air our dirty laundry, that's not what we do. Now, oh my gosh, our big happy family get togethers have been splintered.
Leah Wietholter:
Yeah, it is just so messy. Okay, so I heard that you have a memorable case where a family member committed fraud. Would you be willing to share that with us?
Tiffany Couch:
I've got so many, so many, but I... So yes, one of my most memorable and saddest stories was Bonnie. I call her Bonnie because of where she lived. Again, very modest life. Her and her husband just did a great job of diligently saving their money. She lived in a trailer, and we live in the Pacific Northwest, we have sometimes very cold winters. One of her neighbors wanted to do a welfare check on her and her son because they noticed that in her trailer the windows had been broken, and we were having one of those winters where we got a lot of snow. So Adult Protective Services went over there and they found Bonnie, and she has a developmentally disabled son who was probably in his 40s or 50s at the time, she'd taken care of him for her whole life.
Adult Protective Services came in and said, "Oh my gosh, you can't live like this. We've got to get you some help." She said, "Well, I have a son up in this other nice town." This son had a high power job, CEO level job, made really great money, had a wife, had kids, had all of that. So they called the son, and the son said, "Of course, I will help my mother and brother move up here," a couple hours away from where mom and brother were. They sold her little trailer and her little spot and moved her up into, we call an efficiency apartment in the same town where brother lives. So now mom and her disabled son are living in an apartment and they ostensibly can get some help from say the successful son.
So fast-forward about two or three years, her rent doesn't get paid. It's like $600 a month. Adult Protective Services comes in with the police, and I don't know why the police came, maybe the police came later, it doesn't really matter, but I remember the police officer telling me, "Tiffany, I walked in there, they're using towels for blankets to keep warm in this apartment." She said, "Tiffany, they only had spam and mac and cheese in the cupboard, and it wasn't even Kraft mac and cheese." She said, "It was off-brand mac and cheese." Bonnie said, "I don't know why my rent's not getting paid. I have a lot of money in the bank and my son will make the payments." When she got to Bonnie's account, she pulled the accounts, she only had $600 in the bank. She called the son, what we call the successful son, and he said, "I can't handle my mom and my brother anymore," and he hung up the phone.
So she got all these bank accounts, she saw some weird stuff, and they hired me to figure out what happened. Crazily enough, this woman, who's not using the heat and using towels for blankets to keep warm, when she moved from her home in her trailer, she had over 300 and some odd thousand dollars in the bank, plus she sold that little trailer for like $76,000, and her combined expenses every month were about $800 a month and her social security was handling the expenses. So really, what she had saved really should never have been touched because she was living on her income. The police officer said, "Well, what are you doing with this money?" She says, "Well, I'm going to die one day and I need my son to be taken care of, so I never touched my savings because I wanted to make sure my son was always taken care of."
Long story short, I get in. Literally, the month that she moves to this new efficiency apartment and to where the son lives, son gets POA, power of attorney, pays off his mortgage. Then he buys a bunch of new furniture, he bought jewelry for his wife. Then he was paying for the kids' private schools. You can see, I put it on a graph, and the police loved this because you could see Bonnie, how she spent her money the year prior to moving, and then you see this crazy graph spike in terms of how much money got spent the month that he took over. Then he spends it all the way down until there's $600 in the bank and her rent bounces.
They arrest him. I mean, this was a big deal. He was the CEO of something big up there, and they arrest him. When they said, "Well, why did you do it?" He said, "Well, I was just getting my inheritance early. It's going to be all mine anyway." "What about your brother?" "Well, I figured we could put him on state aid and he would be taken care of."
Leah Wietholter:
Oh my gosh.
Tiffany Couch:
Oh, it's terrible. She didn't know that she could get Social Security Disability and some help for that son, so they did help her with that. He had enough money in this 401k that they were able, between what he had in his house equity and his 401k, they were able to replenish the money. A lot of times that never happens. He did go to prison. In Washington State, we have what's called a Slayer Statute, I don't know how many other states have this, but the Slayer Statute is if you commit a fraud against a vulnerable adult, then you cannot inherit from that vulnerable adult. I believe that that Slayer Statute was applied to him. My favorite part of this case, it was five or six years later, I was giving a speech somewhere here in Washington State, and this person raised their hand and they're like, "I was the adult protective services person that was in there with the police, and it was terrible."
Leah Wietholter:
Gosh. I mean, you kind of already answered my next question, but what typically motivates someone to defraud their family?
Tiffany Couch:
I call them the age-old rationalizations. I need the money. I deserve it because I'm taking care of them. That's probably the biggest one I see, especially in a caretaker situation, I deserve it because I'm taking care of them and I'm not getting paid for it. Mom liked me better anyway. I did it because I could. It's the same ones, I believe, that we see in business with an employer-employee relationship, although we do bring in, she liked my sister better, I'm just taking what was my fair share. We get some of those kinds of familial rationalizations, what I call them.
Leah Wietholter:
One that I just thought of too because of a recent story I was told, was especially if the parents have always kind of helped that child too.
Tiffany Couch:
The one that didn't launch.
Leah Wietholter:
They're like, well... Right. Well, mom would've given me this money anyway. But now she might be vulnerable, incapacitated, whatever.
Tiffany Couch:
Correct, she might not be able to make that decision anymore. My favorite is when mom or grandma's always giving everybody $20 or sometimes $5 at Christmas, and suddenly that changes to hundreds or thousands. It's like, well, that's not what she did before.
Leah Wietholter:
All right, so as we start to wind down this conversation, because I think we've definitely given people a lot to think about and maybe spooked a few-
Tiffany Couch:
I'm sure.
Leah Wietholter:
...but I always like to end with some sort of empowerment and hope that this can be detected and prevented. What is some advice you would give someone who suspects a family member that's hiding money or committing fraud or what we'd even call elder abuse?
Tiffany Couch:
Well, what I would-
Leah Wietholter:
Financial elder abuse.
Tiffany Couch:
Yes, financial. By the way, a lot of times financial elder abuse is accompanied by that person not being taken care of physically. So we can see deterioration of that person's physical and/or mental health that's not just attributable to whatever they're suffering from. That's also really important to see. For example, what I will see or what I will hear about in these cases is this person was taken away from their church family, or they stopped playing cards every week. Every single appointment with every single professional, whether it was the accountant or the person who did their hair or the investment advisor, was always accompanied by this other person. Now this vulnerable adult has been, it's almost like an abusive relationship, where they are not free to even have conversations with anybody else without being in the earshot of our suspect. That is really important to understand if that's happening, as well as do we have a deterioration of their physical? Are they really being physically taken care of well? Those would be really big red flags.
If I had a client call me and say, I have this issue, I would say, well, first of all, you've got to get a lawyer. You do. I know that sometimes is scary for people, and I'm always able to recommend really great lawyers who are not going to spend a lot of their money to give them really good advice and discuss options, which include options for me to assist with any sort of assistance. If possible, I would start with the bank statements. Just grab the bank statements. If we can grab some tax returns too, even better, but let's at least see what's going on. Sometimes that takes court decisions to get access to those things, but if there's enough information there, a lot of times the court will grant sometimes what we call a guardian or somebody to go in and take a look.
I like to empower people before it happens. We can actually put internal controls in. If Leah is taking care of mom physically and paying her bills, then let's send the bank statements to sister Tiffany who can review them and make sure everything's okay. It's just like we do in a business. So there are things we can do to protect the vulnerable adult and protect the person taking care of the vulnerable adult. Let's agree on an amount to pay vulnerable adult, because they doing a yeoman's job of taking care of their life and our ailing family member, so that person should be compensated for something. We should come up with some sort of reasonable compensation for that.
There are things that I think we can do at the outset of these situations that help avoid what's going on. We're always going to have those unscrupulous people, but the more that we can do at the outset, especially as you age, as all of us age, we should talk about those things and how we want those things handled in the event that we can't handle them ourselves.
Leah Wietholter:
Yeah, I know it's very uncomfortable, just even from personal experience. It is very uncomfortable to have these conversations, but much like a prenup in a divorce, I mean, you always hope the divorce doesn't happen, but in this case aging is going to happen. I mean, this is kind of inevitable, and I don't know what condition I'm going to be in as I age and who's going to be around me, and so just setting those things up at the beginning.
Tiffany Couch:
Yeah, and we can do things like that. We can say, hey, here's the income I have, and most of it comes in every month, but gosh, I do get this once annual refund from my life insurance or I get this quarterly dividends and they come in check form and not in a wire form. I can write those things down. I can say I want my personal representative to be paid X per month. There are things that we can do. I can take a video of all of my jewelry. That's a big one in families, they took grandma's jewelry or mom's jewelry. I can take pictures or I can do an inventory of my most precious assets.
I have an aunt right now who is writing a list, my uncle died a couple years ago, she started writing a list, "Well, what do you want?" I'm like, "Linda, I'm not going to tell you what I want. If you want to give me something, you can." She goes, "Well, no, this person wants this and this person wants that." I'm like, "If nobody wants that beautiful bed, I will take the bed." But she's writing a list of who's going to get what right now. My grandma had nothing. My grandma had nothing, and she used sticky notes to put on things. I got some of her china and things like that, it had a little sticky note in her handwriting that had Tiffany on it. It could be as simple as that.
Leah Wietholter:
Yeah, it doesn't have to-
Tiffany Couch:
It's not very safe because I don't know if I got everything with all the stickies.
Leah Wietholter:
True. Very true.
Tiffany Couch:
But it was her way.
Leah Wietholter:
Well, we were just having a conversation the other day on our team about how my parents age, some of them are even getting into crypto and things like that, and just having to track that down if it's not part of a list. I mean, that could get into a whole estate planning thing, but just make a list of everything you have and put it somewhere safe so that-
Tiffany Couch:
People don't like to talk about it. We take big trips now, we'll go to Europe for a few weeks and I'll write a list, I'll tell my son, "Okay, all these things are here. If this happens, call this person." He's like, "Mom, I don't want to talk about it." I'm like, "I know you don't. I know you don't, but you have to know. You have to know." Sometimes even the kids don't want to talk about it. It's the worst thing to talk about. My dad used to come to my office and say, "This is what I want for my funeral." I'm like, "Dad, no." I'm so glad he did. But we have to have those conversations.
Leah Wietholter:
All right. Well, Tiffany, thank you so much. I do have one more question for you, not specific to this topic, but what is one myth about forensic accounting that you'd like to bust?
Tiffany Couch:
That it's always cool and sexy.
Leah Wietholter:
Oh my goodness, yes, that's a good one.
Tiffany Couch:
I tell everybody who thinks they want to be a forensic accountant, number one, you've got to love spreadsheets and you've got to love entering stuff into spreadsheets for hours or weeks at a time. Number two, if you never liked writing a term paper in college, you're going to hate being a forensic accountant because almost every single one of my cases ends basically in me writing a term paper or an expert report. Number three, the other non-sexy, non-cool thing is somebody else's job is to poke holes in everything you've done. If you do not have the intestinal fortitude to handle that, it's not cool or sexy. I do have the great stories, I've got stories galore and I always say it's cheaper to hire me to entertain your guests at a happy hour than it is to have me as a forensic accountant. It's cool and sexy with the stories, but in order to get to the cool and sexy stories, you've got to do a whole lot of work.
Leah Wietholter:
A whole lot of work in a very short amount of time, sometimes with messy information, and then you have to make sure it's right for the very reason you said at the end, because it's going to be scrutinized at some of the highest levels.
Tiffany Couch:
That's right.
Leah Wietholter:
Well, Tiffany, this has been a lot of fun.
Tiffany Couch:
Same.
Leah Wietholter:
Where can listeners learn more about your work or get help if they suspect fraud in their own family?
Tiffany Couch:
Oh, that's nice of you. My website is AcuityForensics.com, and that's A-C-U-I-T-Y, Forensics with an S on the end, dot-com, or you can Google me. You'll find me on LinkedIn and my website and all that fun stuff.
Leah Wietholter:
Well, great. We'll make sure to link to that in the show notes and thank you so much.
Tiffany Couch:
Thank you so much.
Leah Wietholter:
Thank you for listening to the Data Sleuth Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review wherever you listen. The Data Sleuth Podcast is a production of Workman Forensics. To learn more about our investigation services and resources, please visit WorkmanForensics.com.