Oh Look, Another License Plate That Reminds You of Work While Sitting in Godawful Traffic

Posted on by Caleb Newquist

Either "EBITDA" was taken or the driver didn't appreciate the irony of excluding depreciation on a car's license plate.

[Imgur via r/accounting]

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Feds Not Amused by Area Man’s Crank Calls to Coast Guard, Filing of Tax Returns for Hookers

So. You’re 22 years old, you operate an Internet escort service out of your house and you’re feeling a little bored. What’s a man-child to do?

Well, making the assumption that you spend a lot of your spare time watching old Crank Yankers episodes, you might ring up the Coast Guard and tell them a shuttle at the Kennedy Space Center is about to be under attack.

Or if that doesn’t get the fired stoked in your plums, try calling them up again to say that your yacht is sinking off the coast of New York with ’10 souls’ on board.

Yeah! That’s the ticket:

Nicholas Barbati of Daytona Beach twice made the U.S. Coast Guard scramble to check out false information he gave them on separate occasions — including reports of a threat from the sea headed for a space shuttle about to take off from the Kennedy Space Center, federal officials said Tuesday.

Barbati, 22, also called the Coast Guard in Washington, D.C., to tell them his 32-foot yacht was sinking off the coast of New York, investigators said.

Oh. And about those escorts, “Barbati pleaded guilty to the two hoax cases in August, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said. Then, in October, Barbati pleaded guilty to filing false claims with the IRS. He filed income tax returns for prostitutes employed by his Internet escort service operating out of his house, investigators said.”

Now you may be thinking that Barbati was just a little mischievous and he just made some poor decisions. Let us dispel that notion from your head right now:

Barbati’s computer was seized and it showed Barbati had made 584 other harassing and hoax calls. Between May and June 2009, Barbati made “swatting” calls to law enforcement dispatch centers around the world so dispatchers could not identify where the calls came from, investigators said.

In one case, Barbati told dispatchers he was going to kill a baby if the police did not arrive soon and gave a fictitious address, the release said.

But back to the hookers for second – if you’re going to provide employer-prepared tax returns, the least you could do is prepare the them accurately. You don’t want the Better Business Bureau on your case.

Prank calls to Coast Guard, dispatch centers land man in federal prison [DBNJ]

No One Is Giving Up Spreadsheets, So The IIA Figured It Better Put Some Audit Guidance Out There

This story is republished from CFOZone, where you’ll find news, analysis and professional networking tools for finance executives.

Many finance departments would grind to a halt if forced to do without spreadsheets. They’re quick, easy and inexpensive tools for manipulating and analyzing data that just about anyone can master.

However, these attributes also mean that spreadsheets create a tremendous risk, particularly if their results are incorporated into the company’s financial reports or used to support a business’ operations.

With this in mind, the Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA) in June issued GTAG (global technology audit guide) 14, a guide for auditing what it calls “user-developed applications,” or UDAs. While spreadsheets are the most visible type of UDA, the term also can include applications like user-developed databases and reports. UDAs are “…created and used by end users to extract, sort, calculate, and compile organizational data to analyze trends, make business decisions or summarize operational and financial data,” the IIA states.


By their nature, UDAs present three types of risk. One is data integrity – the old “garbage in, garbage out.” User developed applications don’t follow a structured application development cycle, and lack any sort of change management or version controls – that is, any number of individuals may be able to update a spreadsheet. All this increases the risk of inaccurate data making its way into the application.

Next is the risk that confidential data is compromised. Many UDAs can easily be attached to an email and sent to someone who shouldn’t have access to the data.

Finally, there’s what the IIA calls “availability risk.” Because many UDAs reside on flash drives and individual PCs, they’re easy to overlook when the company is backing up data. Or, the information can easily be lost altogether.

Internal auditors can take several steps in their audits to reduce the risks any UDAs in use pose to their firms. A starting point is identifying key UDAs. These typically are those that are part of the financial or management reporting processes, or use to comply with regulations. One-off spreadsheets used on an ad-hoc basis probably aren’t key.

The auditors also need to assess the risks posed by the key UDAs. To understand this, they’ll need to know who uses the applications, and how. From this, they can estimate the financial, operational and regulatory risks the UDAs present. The more complex the applications are, the more embedded they are in organizational processes, and the greater their complexity, the more risk they present.

Next up is examining the controls in place around the UDAs to determine if they reduce the risks to an acceptable level for the organization.

Spreadsheets and other user-developed applications play a valuable role in many organizations. At the same time, they can expose companies to a great deal of risk. Appropriate management and control is critical to mitigating the risks they present.