Over two hundred million dollars a year is lost to industry through employee frauds. This, however, is only the amount that is ferreted out and made public. There is no telling how much additional is lost either in undetected frauds or those that for one reason or another are hushed. That the record should contain fraud in such prolific measure is not the exciting feature. The part about these frauds that does cause blush, at least to the cheek of an auditor, is that when the frauds do "pop," it is found that so many of them had been started and blithely going on for long periods of time untouched by auditing pursuit. Even more damaging is the fact that frequently some of these frauds come to light not as a result of internal control or auditing technique, but wholly out of accidental or adventitious circumstances. Chance, rather than auditing, prevails. In the hope that laboratory dissection and analysis of frauds might, through the development of some new or modified auditing technique, narrow if not eliminate the fortuitous aspects of detection, a case study was undertaken. The study was confined to employee frauds and did not consider skullduggery by employers themselves. For case material, accountants, surety companies, banks, stock brokerage concerns and industrial and commercial organizations were invited to submit details of frauds that were unearthed by "happenstance" rather than by the normal workings of accounting controls.

The article discusses various issues related to the establishment of a federal tax bar in the U.S. Viewed from the narrow and introspective standpoint of the professions involved, there appear to he several avenues of utility. There is need for the better apprising taxpayers and the professions of the difference between the general practitioner and the tax practitioner. The field is also fertile for a more wholesome understanding all the way around of the separate boundaries and roles of the attorney and the accountant respectively. These functions may well be the province and product of an organization such as contemplated here. The organization may also take under its wing observations and recommendations on the rules of the game and having reached agreement from within, it could then present a coordinated viewpoint in the formulation or maintenance of correlative rules by external agencies, including the governmental departments and professional societies. Another possibility is the development of a central library for tax briefs akin to the libraries maintained in the general field by the larger bar associations, thereby affording practitioners the same advantage now enjoyed by the government staff in preliminary research for briefing on a particular tax subject.