Angela Mennit, Forensic Accountant for the FBI

This Thursday professional meeting was awesome! We learned about Forensic Accounting from
Angela S. Mennitt, a FBI agent from Minnesota. She graduated in Economics and through her career
choices got into the accounting field and auditing. She is now part of the Utah branch of the FBI, and
she gave us some insights on what the FBI accountants do.

As an FBI agent, accountants are mostly involved in “White Collar” crime, which entails fraud,
deceit, manipulation, etc. Sometimes they get called in to the spy side of the agency, to fight against
corrupt corporations or mob organizations with money laundering operations. With most cases it is the
job of the forensic accountants to follow the money and prove the purpose of intent.

She described the different crimes that she has seen and dealt with. One group of crimes is
called Affinity Fraud, a case of fraud where the victims have some sort of commonality between them
and the perpetrator. The perpetrator uses this connection to get victims to buy into the scam. An
example of this is Bernie Madoff, whose victims were mostly Jewish. A case that she had data on was
one that involved the “Tiger Woods of foreign exchange” right here in Utah valley. The perpetrator got
his family and neighbors to let him invest money for them in foreign exchanges. It is no crime to lose
money or gain money in exchanges, the crime was when he lied to his relatives about the gains he was
receiving to get more money to cover the losses on old investments.



Another class of cases we looked at was health care fraud. Health care fraud costs the
government around 80 billion dollars a year! She talked about how this will not be fixed in the current
Medicaid system that we have because the FBI is always chasing the money. We need preventative
actions to solve the problem. The FBI is able to recover about 200 million each year, there is a big
difference; the other money just disappears.

The reason that it is such a problem in the United States is that there is such a low barrier of
entry into starting a medical equipment store. After one is set up, the owners go out to doctors and
perspective patients to get more orders for their goods. Then the bill gets put in the taxpayers lap when
the Medicaid program pays for the equipment. Angela showed us a case from Florida that involved a
family that set up three different supply stores. She showed us data on how the money of the
businesses was distributed. There were costs for purchasing the equipment, other business costs, and
then cash disbursements to the family and conspiring marketing company, which was also owned by the
family. It seemed blatantly obvious that these stores were a scam even though in criminal accounting
you have to be conservative with what is labeled other business expense. Most of the time these kinds
of frauds are pointed out to the FBI by other supply stores in the area, patient recruiting, and
advertisements that offer medical equipment for free.

Angela really enjoys her work. It can be tedious at times; scanning information into a computer,
cleaning data, and going through bank statements, but being an agent can take you exotic places. She
has been all over the world with her work. She has gone to Istanbul, to Beijing, and many other places
in Europe, and South America.