Even though I hadn’t done anything wrong.
Dad tapped the paper.
“He couldn’t get authority through the front door.”
I stared at him.
“So he went through a vendor.”
“That’s one possibility. The evidence needs to establish whether the services were real, who authorized the payments, and where the money ultimately went.”
I swallowed.
“And if they were fake?”
Dad looked directly at me.
“Then someone has been stealing from your company.”
The next morning, we hired an independent forensic accounting firm.
We also retained outside legal counsel.
Dad insisted on doing everything properly.
“No private investigations through old friends,” he told me. “No threats. No trying to force confessions.”
He looked at the records.
“Evidence first.”
The investigation took weeks.
Not hours.
We discovered that Lakefront Strategic Solutions had submitted invoices for consulting projects that either didn’t exist or had already been performed by legitimate vendors.
Several internal approvals had been obtained using misleading project descriptions.
