In Chapter 20, Len get started on the big embezzling case, if that’s what it is. In his first job after college, he loved doing “fraud audits” for Arthur Andersen, so this is deja vu for him.
I’ve never been an accountant, but I certainly know a few. A lot of people think it’s boring, but somehow, being a police detective is not! Go figure. Either way it’s problem-solving, where you spend a lot of your time going down dead ends.
In this case, Len has almost nothing to go on: Sierra Helpers has a lot of transactions, the books are a mess, and the guy in charge (Rev. Collins) has no idea what’s going on. He does have his suspicions, though. Money seems to be going out too fast.
But Len’s retired, so he’s happy to do what no accounting firm would ever do and spend the time to figure it out. Dan Markunas (which is me, basically) is helping him. They go to the bank with the Rev and get a printout of all the deposits and withdrawals. Len laboriously enters it all into Lotus 1-2-3 and emails it to Dan.
“Jump back now, the Silicon Valley geniuses are on the case!” At least, that’s what everyone up in the Sierras think later on.
At the time, I was working at Oracle, so loading the data into a database would have been the natural thing to do. Of course I would have realized pretty quickly that this was a lot of overhead for a small amount of data, and just worked with Excel.
His buddy Matt drops by his office and they look at the data together. Dan gets a flash of inspiration for how to crack this case. I guess you’ll have to read the chapter to see what that is.