Phar Mor Case

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Phar-Mor is a company that sells variety of household products and prescription drugs. Monus used the strategy of deep discount retailing to beat other companies’ prices. The only competitor for Phar-Mor was Wal-Mart, so Michael “Mickey” Monus-the president and the chief operating officer of Phar-Mor-used the “power buying” (the phrase that Monus used to describe his strategy). Phar-Mor sells their products at very low prices to undersell their bog competitor Wal-Mart, but unfortunately, by using this strategy Phar-Mor began to lose money. The fraud begun when Phar-Mor manipulated their financial statements, so that, no losses are reported in their statement. The company did so in order to preserve their reputation and their success and hide their losses. Based on this fault records and fault financial statements, big companies and banks began to invest in Phar-Mor. They invest approximately $1.14 billion in Phar-Mor thinking that it is a good investment because the fraud was not yet discovered. The fraud was altering records to understate cost of goods sold and overstate inventory. By doing so, the company appears to be profitable and not losing; in addition to hiding cash flow problems. It was discovered that there was a misapprehension of $10 million. What lead to the fraud and what make it difficult to uncover? According to ch 5 in the book and page 3 in the case How was this fraud possible and where were the auditors? Auditors didn’t do their jobs. In this case, the auditing company was Coopers&Lybrant. In order to realize the fraud, Mickey Monus and other had to put all their losses into expense accounts and come up with the way of boosting their asset accounts. They came up with an idea of inflating inventory. This wouldn’t be possible to do if Coopers&Lybrant wouldn’t do their job negligently. They were the lowest bid on Phar-Mor’s case, so

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