Texas Twist of Fate - the Sad Story of Coppell's Mayor
Sandra K. Gates, Cheryl L. Prachyl, Carol Sullivan · Journal of business and behavioral sciences · 2014
INTRODUCTIONThis case illustrates for students how a financial crime can lead to more serious crimes: homicide and suicide. The case involves procurement card abuse by a city official. What differentiates this case from other similar procurement card abuse is that it resulted in the homicide of the mayor's daughter and suicide of the mayor. The investigation of the fraud and confrontation of the mayor led to the violent outcome. Another aspect of the case is that, contrary to the information that most fraudsters are men, the primary perpetrator in this case was a woman. Additionally, ideas are presented to perhaps prevent this type of tragedy from occurring again in the future. Our hope is that educators will be interested in the case and share it with their students so that they can learn from the mistakes of others and perhaps prevent this type of fraud from occurring again.LITERATURE REVIEWJoseph Wells (2001) used the greed or framework to explain why employees commit fraud. He continued to encourage CPAs to understand what motivates people to commit fraud so that they can better assess risk and assist employers or clients in implementing appropriate preventative and detective measures.Kassem and Higson (2012) created a new fraud triangle model (as compared to Well's original fraud triangle of pressure, opportunity, and rationalization) and included motivation, capabilities, opportunity, and integrity as the categories. Personal integrity seemed to be the new category and they assert that personal integrity can be an observable through observing both a person's decisions as well as the decision making process. Personal pressure is described in Cressey's (1953) book called Other People's Money and he noted pressures such as difficulty in paying back debts, problems resulting from failure, business reversals, physical isolation, status gaining, and employer-employee relations. The Mayor, in this case, was motivated to commit fraud because of financial need after her husband died and she had extreme pressure. Further, as a respected member of the community and a public official, she experienced status-gaining pressure in spite of financial reversals in her life.Bressler (2009) identifies internal crimes against businesses as theft, embezzlement, fraud, customer identity theft, and sabotage. Procurement card use has increased dramatically since the 1990s (Holdegraver, 2005), yet the fraud opportunities also increase with the use of these cards. a July 1, 2005 to June 30, 2006 study, the GAO found that 41% of an estimated $14 billion in card purchases were either not properly authorized or had not been signed by an independent third party as called for in federal rules. Rain (2005) describes several cases of procurement card frauds and offers suggestions for preventions. These defensive techniques would have been useful to the City of Coppell public officials.Brody and Kiehl (2010) describe white-collar crime violations as anti-trust violations, bank frauds, bankruptcy fraud, bribery/kickbacks, computer/intemet fraud, consumer fraud, counterfeiting, credit card fraud, economic espionage and trade secret theft, embezzlement/larceny, extortion/blackmail, financial fraud, forgery, healthcare fraud, identity theft, public corruption, racketeering and telemarketing fraud. Perri and Lichtenwald (2007) go one step further in defining as who ...straddle both the white-collar crime arena and, eventually, the violent crime arena. They continue to assert In circumstances where there is a threat of detection, red-collar criminals commit brutal acts of violence to silence the people who have detected their fraud and to prevent further disclosure. This sad case goes one step further in the research area because the violence was inflicted on the Mayor's innocent daughter and on herself. The next section describes the basic facts of the case. …