Customer Reviews

Corporate Crime Investigations

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Pointless, pedantic power-point-speak, Bologna and Shaw offer a mindset that focuses on the dimwit scams that would leave a corporation pennywise and pound foolish. The text reflects conventional wisdom of the 90s: beware counter-culture stapler thieves, but with enough accountants around you, all is well. Such wisdom cost investors billions from dot-com bubbles and speculative scams.

Their reasoning fails on other grounds as well. Bologna and Shaw discount the practice of law, rife with lawyers and politicians who "hairsplit" and texts, like the UCC, which they see as outdated. Of course, their recitation of 1968 Black's Law definitions of crimes suggests that Bologna and Shaw are themselves somewhat out of date outside their field, and a bit dismissive to boot.

Which leads to their field: accounting. The meat of the book reads like a series of 2-hour power point presentations: "Watch out for..." with a handful of notes and negligible application. The point condenses thus: "To stop fraud, hire accountants."

To reach that point, one could sift through unhelpfully prejudicial generalizations like "Theft on the job is largely a counterculture phenomenon." Huh? So look for the long-haired employees when staplers go missing? And in what sense was Enron culture "counter culture"?

Finally, the disingenuous flattery and cloying, typified by statements like "It is truly amazing how ingenious relatively uneducated on-the-job thieves are in circumventing control mechanisms designed by people of much higher intellect..."

Bologna and Shaw seek to flatter executives, possibly to advance their consulting prospects, rather than to provide useful advice. Perhaps a corporate crime investigator is too dense to think through the obvious.

Dollars spent chasing dimes - the hallmark of lousy advice.