The Embezzler Next Door

April 15, 2010 — -- Quick quiz:

(1) Your employer reimburses your expense report twice by mistake. Do you tell?

(2) Your client accidentally overpays you for services rendered. Do you come clean?

(3) You discover that your supervisor is stealing from the company. Do you speak up and risk being shown the door?

Don't be so quick to answer "yes" to these questions. Headline-grabbing white collar criminals aren't the only ones who succumb to squishy ethics.

When it comes to committing corporate fraud, "You think it's just Martha Stewart, Bernie Madoff and C-level executives," said Kelly Pope, a visiting professor of accounting at Wake Forest University Schools of Business who's filming a documentary on white collar crime.

But this former forensic accountant with international firm KPMG warned that co-workers, friends, family and neighbors sometimes turn out to be white collar criminals, too.

"You can come from a good background and have a good religious upbringing," said Pope, who also teaches full time at DePaul University in Chicago. But, she added, "You can make a couple of bad choices and end up in prison. Anybody can."

In fact, the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE), an organization aimed at stamping out corporate fraud, reports that most employees who commit fraud on the job are first-time offenders, or as Pope calls them, "ordinary people who made mistakes."

It's not just corner-office bigwigs making a play for their employer's cash. The ACFE reports that 18 percent of fraud is committed by executives or upper management. But it also reports that 29 percent is committed by members of a company's accounting department.

Diann Cattani was one of these workplace thieves. She embezzled $500,000 over the course of four years from a small consulting firm she worked for in the late '90s. After her conscience got the better of her and she turned herself in, Cattani served 18 months in federal prison.

"I'm probably your stereotypical white collar criminal," said Cattani, who now works at a small accounting firm, a job she said she owes to a colleague who highly recommended her. "I'm not tattooed and pierced. I grew up in an insulated and isolated world."