Corruptacy (eBook)

CHAPTER 1

First Real Assignment

I’m on a Delta flight, going from Atlanta, Georgia to Portland Maine. The flight is somewhere over and near Gainesboro, Tennessee where I was born and raised. My name is Jeffrey Cordell Allan and I am an investigative forensic Certified Public Accountant for the EOUST, which, in plain English, are the abbreviations standing for the Executive Office of United States Trustees. The EOUST is actually located in Washington, D.C., but I’m allowed to work out of my home in Helen, Georgia. I live there because I was born in the South, love the mountains, and fishing and tubing where I can relax and get away from my highly stressful job.

Where I grew up in Jackson County, Tennessee, my neighbors and friends didn’t use the word forensic, so to them I guess they really didn’t understand my job, but in my field of expertise it is used to describe the application of scientific knowledge to legal and accounting problems. What all of this means to me is using my computer and technological knowledge to look for fraud and corruption in bankruptcy cases.

In my brief career I have found there is a lot of public confusion about just what bankruptcy is. The term and theory of bankruptcy actually had its origination in ancient Hebrew society.

The Bankruptcy Act of 1800 was the first law passed in the United States and that Act primarily applied only to merchants. Today the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act is the latest attempt by Congress to address all areas of concern.

Bankruptcy judges are appointed by the US Court of Appeals and preside over all bankruptcy cases.

US Trustees were created by the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1978 to be responsible for the administration of bankruptcy cases. I work for the Executive Office of United States Trustees.

It has been my experience that most consumer bankruptcies are caused by either credit card abuse or by huge medical bills. Of course, you get the undisciplined consumer also who buys more than he or she can afford. Personal bankruptcies usually fall into one of two sections of the bankruptcy code. There is Chapter 7 which is straight bankruptcy, or Chapter 13 which involves either a partial or complete repayment of debt over a period of time. Both sections require a private Standing Trustee, appointed by the District US Trustee, to administer the case.

My job doesn’t take me into areas of debtor fraud, caused by the debtor intentionally buying up to the limit of what creditors would allow him to buy, or hiding assets from creditors, and then declaring bankruptcy. My job takes me into the area of funds paid or seized by Standing Trustees from people who have been unfortunate enough to find themselves at the mercy of the bankruptcy courts, due to their inability or unwillingness to pay their debts.

Since graduating from college and passing my CPA examination, I have been working for two years and, up to now have been low man on the totem pole and thus have only handled routine assignments such as reviewing reports and making notes of significant finds of abuse that may have been uncovered. The stress comes from completing my assignments in the time allotted to me. I don’t know what idiot figured out how much time a review should take, but it is obvious to me that whoever set the time budgets either had never worked an actual case review or (more likely) didn’t do a thorough job and left out a lot of steps that should have been taken to assure every suspected area of possible fraud or abuse was covered.

The plane’s engines drone on and it makes me sleepy. I close my eyes and think of my girl friend, Rebecca Stewart, and look forward to my seeing her on my return trip from Portland to Washington where she works as an attorney for an upscale Washington firm. I met Becca four years ago when we were students at Georgetown University, I in the School of Business and she in Pre-law. We’ve been dating now for a couple of years. We’ve talked of getting married, but she comes from a broken home and is frightened with the prospects of marriage. I think it will happen one day, but not just yet.

My thoughts now center on my new assignment, and the close call I had in getting here. This is not just a routine assignment. It is my chance to put my investigative skills to work and make a good impression as well as possibly accomplish something that will make a meaningful difference. My boss, EOUST Director Zack Callahan, spent two hours on the phone with me a week ago outlining his expectations. He had received a detailed confidential letter from Maine Chapter 13 Trustee James Street outlining his suspicions regarding his long-time office manager, Norma Jean Brent.

Callahan decided it was time for me to “earn my wings” so he assigned the case to me. He told me to report to him at the end of every day, and he expected me to do a thorough job. This was my first real case, so, of course, I was excited.

It was the fall of the year and starting to get cold in Maine, so I packed heavy and carried my laptop computer along with my brief case and suitcase to the airport. I was lucky to get a direct flight to Portland and left my apartment in plenty of time to get to the Atlanta-Hartsfield Airport, and took GA 400 South outside of Cleveland, Georgia. It was starting to get late and the drive so far had been monotonous, but as I passed an overpass, suddenly a huge bolder came crashing through the windshield of my Jeep. It only grazed my arm and landed in the passenger seat, but after stopping, I realized I was lucky to be alive. It was if a powerful, invisible force had protected me. I was wearing my new shades, a gift from me to me, so my eyes were protected from breaking glass. Somehow I came to a stop after pulling off the road and tried to get out of the car, but couldn’t. My hands were quivering, stuck to the wheel, and I had no strength to open the door. I was still shaking when a highway patrolman appeared and opened my door. He asked if I was hurt, and I told him I thought I was very lucky to be alive. He went over the entire car for his report and it all checked out. He told me they had other complaints about someone dropping large stones or boulders from the overpass into the traffic below. He took me to a service station where I cleaned up from the broken glass. I looked at my watch and I had less than an hour before my plane was scheduled to leave. My car was still drivable, so, I headed for the airport.

I made it to the gate just as it was closing. After begging to get on the flight, the gate official finally opened the gate and on the airplane I went with my suitcase in one hand and laptop and brief case in the other. Of course, I was the last one on the plane. I looked down the rows and rows of passengers trying to locate my seat, and of course, it was on the very back row. I knew every eye was on me, and everyone looked unfriendly and angry about being held up because I was late. I thought, “You know, I bet I could cheer them up by leading everyone in singing the ‘Star Spangled Banner’.” Of course I didn’t, but I did think about it.

As I stumbled down the aisle hitting every other isle passenger with either my suitcase or my laptop-briefcase hand, I heard a steward say “He’s going to kill a passenger”. I looked around and a very nice steward took my suitcase and took it up front, and I made it to my seat without any other disturbance. I was worn out!

After a two-and-a-half hour flight, we made it into Portland, where I picked up my rental car and I checked in at the airport motel. I was looking forward to the next day and meeting Mr. Street and Ms. Brent.

The next morning, I checked out of my motel and drove the twenty-six miles to Brunswick, Maine. James Street greeted me warmly and appeared greatly relieved I was there. When I asked to meet his office manager and assistant, Norma Jean Brent, Street told me that she hadn’t been to work in over a week, but had been seen in town by one of the other lawyer’s secretaries. She was neither answering his telephone calls nor would she come to the door when he went to her house. He informed me that the Trustee office was in shambles and in total disarray. He wasn’t kidding! All of the computer accounting records, all of the bank statements with the cancelled checks and deposit slips were gone. So was the most current Receipts Book. Fortunately, Street had all of the previous Receipt Books locked in his office safe, so all we would permanently lose in records were the past three weeks. There were potentially thousands of documents that had to be reconstructed into a meaningful record. It looked like a challenging task was in front of me.

I was not convinced Street is the paragon of virtue he makes himself out to be. Why did he wait so long to notify the Director of the missing records? I mean, in my suspicious mind, he and Ms. Brent could have cooked this whole thing up. Street and I went to the bank where the account was handled, talked to the local president of the bank, and explained the dilemma. What would it take for the bank to look up the microfilm records of all the transactions and print them out for me to re-construct a record of each debtor’s account? The bank was willing to spend their resources, but it would take a good month to produce all of the transactions.

Street looked genuinely...