Intro. Barry Minkow, a young investor in the 1980’s, started a door-to-door carpet cleaning service in his parents’ garage. Despite competition from existing cleaning companies, Minkow’s company soared to the top, making upwards of $200,000 in its first year of operation. The company, now known as ZZZZ Best Company, Inc., was so successful that it was publicly traded by 1986. Minkow and his associates became instantly wealthy when their company went public. Minkow quickly became an example of what youth’s in America could achieve with hard work and appeared on talk shows such as The Oprah Winfrey Show. Unfortunately, Minkow’s success arose from fraud and Ponzi schemes, rather than hard work and dedication to his company. In order to obtain finances for ZZZZ Best, Minkow committed credit card forgery. More importantly, Minkow schemed with an insurance adjuster to confirm that his company performed insurance restoration contracts. These contracts were the bulk of ZZZZ Best’s false revenues, which swayed banks to extend loans to the company. Still, ZZZZ Best’s auditors failed to uncover the fraudulent nature of the company’s financial statements which eventually led to Minkow’s conviction on fifty-seven counts of securities fraud. Had the auditors taken note of the red flags in the company’s …show more content…
Before doing so, Minkow required the audit firm to sign a confidentiality agreement, which prohibited follow up calls to other parties involved in the contract. Despite the warning signs, Ernst & Whinney’s inspector, Larry Gray, was unable to detect that Minkow had created the fake restoration site that could guide the firm. The firm failed to notice that the restoration contracts did not identify insured parties, insurance companies, locations of the jobs, and many other important operational details that certain assurance and attestation services can