The answers to last blog's trivia:
Nick worked in the Singapore office: Internally what was the slang term for the Singapore office? Fortress Singapore. FYI, this is not a reflection on Singapore the country but the management in the Singapore office.
What was the name of the account Nick used to process his unauthorized trades? 88888
Why did the auditors fail to detect the unauthorized trades? The illicit stock trades were recorded in the 88888 account. The IT department was told that the 88888 account was an error-clearing account, therefore no need to print the 88888 account on the stock trading register.
What event caused Nick’s fraud scheme to become visible? An earthquake in Japan caused the market to go in a different direction than his expectation causing the losses to become larger than he could conceal.
Why is this important to the auditing profession? My guess, since the auditors were auditing around the computer, they did not know about the 88888 account. Fraud data analytics would have had the opportunity to detect these trades. At least, I hope.
Studying historical cases of fraud provides great learning opportunities.