Liar Liar – Pants on Fire

Forgive me, I’m an accountant.  It’s a problem that the therapy and drugs have failed to cure. How did this happen?  Hell, if I know. When I was sixteen at dinner with my parents and many of my eight siblings, Pop suddenly asked me what I want to do when I grow up. That setting was a combination of the Algonquin Round Table, the town square, and a small claims court.  My parents led the conversation and common topics included, the Vietnam War, national and local politics, neighborhood gossip, which child was doing well in school and which child got caught ditching school.  Praise and scolding flowed in front of the entire family.  My goal was invisibility.  My old man’s attention was rare and unwanted.  So, I looked up and said I wanted to be an accountant. After about most of my siblings stopped laughing (more than one had milk coming out their nose), I wanted to crawl outside, and eat worms. Anyhow, having stated my goal, I went to college, got an accounting degree, and became a CPA.  The culture portrays accountants as boring nerds who are socially cross threaded.  I fit that rubric exactly. But this accountant’s life took some interesting turns.  As an auditor, I have been lied to in at least six languages on four different continents.  The fun part was exposing the lie.  Now when some business schmo starts telling a stretcher, I smile on the inside and think go ahead, keep talking. Here’s the first time I realized that catching cheaters was fun and the job was more about the characters than the numbers. When I was 24, I worked for an extremely small accounting shop on LaSalle Street in Chicago.  After the tax season (taxes weren’t my thing – I called it mental masturbation), I got a special assignment.  Two brothers in their late seventies owned a large hardware store on the near west side.  This was an inner-city operation.  The customers included homeowners, nearby factories, apartment buildings owned by slumlords, and the Chicago Housing Authority – perhaps the biggest slumlord of them all.  One of the brothers decided to die, it happens.  The problem was his widow didn’t trust her brother-in-law, for good reasons.  She hired my firm to review the books. This job fell in my lap. The surviving brother, Asher, was born around 1900.  When I met him, he was 79 years old, five feet nothing tall, and a world class cheater.  He weighed in at about 135 pounds, a lightweight.  He wore tired suit pants, that hadn’t seen an iron in eighteen years, a nondescript dingy shirt and a threadbare sweater, the kind Mr. Rogers wore, except with a broken zipper and holes.  He shaved on Saturday mornings and left the whiskers alone the rest of the week.  I suspect that he bathed on Saturday and let the hygiene coast the rest of the week too.  By Friday he was hard to look at and harder to smell.  Oh, and his fly was often at half-mast.  Every day he had either an unlit pipe or stogie clamped between the few teeth he had left.  Throughout the morning part of his breakfast hung from his face.  There was often drool at the end of the pipe or stogie. Sometimes a lot of drool. One other thing…. Asher was extremely smart and extremely rich. Now for the boring accounting part of the story. Asher had to give his dead brother’s widow a statement of the business value.  Based on that statement, he would pay her for his brother’s share.  For Asher the less he said the business was worth the less he had to pay to the widow.  Pretty simple. The inventory, all the nuts and bolts and nails and tools and pipes and wires and other stuff, makes up most of the value of a hardware store.  If Asher wanted to cheat his sister-in-law and his nephews and his nieces and her grandchildren, he would undervalue the inventory. To value an inventory, one must physically count all stuff.  Then you assign a cost to each thing and add ‘em all up.  It’s not rocket science. To see if the inventory was correctly valued, 24-year-old me had to test the counts and the individual values.  All this data was handwritten on sheets of paper.  There was no computer. First, I worked on the counts. To test Asher’s figures, I had to see where all the inventory was.  The business had several warehouses in the neighborhood, and I went to each floor. One day I looked at a frame building Asher owned across the street.  This building was built right after the Chicago fire in the 1870’s.  I looked and realized there was a third floor I hadn’t visited.  I hunted down Asher and said I wanted to see that floor. He was getting tired of me at that point; he told me there was nothing there.  That only made me really want to check it out.   He groused and gave me the keys to the building.  Access to the third floor was made through a door at street level and then up a long set of wide wooden stairs. At the top of those stairs, I found a dingy abandoned dance hall. Looking around I realized nobody had been in this room for decades – it had heard its last polka.  There was no hidden inventory.  There was a very intricately decorated saddle on a stand.  The kind with detailed leather work and fringe, think Roy Rogers and Trigger.  Over to one side on a table was a papoose, the thing Indian mothers used to carry their babies.  This had beautiful beadwork.  Years later it could have been valued at $70,000 on the Antiques Roadshow.  Spooky. After doing the best I could with the counts I had to test the values assigned to the stuff. That involved selecting a sample of items and looking at how much Asher paid for them.  Remember it’s not difficult. But Asher had a system.  He didn’t use numbers.  The value of 25 pounds of nails was stated as the letters “ck.lk”.  Why, Lord, why? Asher said he wanted to hide what he was paying for his nails from unauthorized people.  It likely had more to do with cheating the IRS.  So, he and his accountants used letters rather than numerals.  He said there was a code, kind of a Rosetta Stone, for converting the letters to numerals. When I asked for the code, he wouldn’t give it, saying it was an important and valuable secret. This went on for days.  Finally, he told me, after I explained that lawyers could help convince him.  It was “BLACKHORSE”. I asked what does “BLACKHORSE” mean?  Asher explained that he B equaled 1, the L equaled 2, the A equaled 3, etc.  Damn, that’s how to make the simple complex.  I had to convert the letters to numbers and do the math. This was a whole new level of mental masturbation. Eventually I got through it all and found a couple places where Asher made “mistakes.”  These mistakes all went in his favor and added up to cheating his dear sister-in-law.  I never knew what the final settlement was (lawyers hammered that out), but Asher was not glad he met me.  I like to think that the widow came out of it with at least $150,000 more in her pocket. Although, realistically I’m sure Asher kept more than he deserved. That’s all the boring accounting stuff, sorry I dragged you through that garden. One of the many things I learned was that for some people being rich was not enough, if you can get a little more, go for it, morals be damned. My relationship with Asher evolved over the weeks I worked in the store. It started out as a straightforward lack of trust between both of us and went south from there.  Over time I realized that Asher had what gamblers call a “tell”.  The closer I got to finding a “mistake” the farther back into his mouth the unlit cigar or pipe went, and more drool showed up.  At times, I feared he would choke.  His drool would drip onto his sweater – lovely.  As the job aged, he tried a couple of classic mob moves.  First, he offered me a part time job (think bribe).  When that didn’t pan out, he developed some malady and headed up to Mayo Clinic for a series of tests. Remember Hyman Roth in The Godfather movies? As Michael Corleone said, “Hyman Roth has been dying from the same heart attack for the last twenty years.”  Finally, he changed lawyers.  Towards the end of the job, he called me into his office/rabbithole and said he’d hired a new lawyer, Manny Schlocky.  This was supposed to shake me.  I never heard of Manny and wasn’t smart enough to care. I didn’t know that this was the start of over forty years of catching liars for fun and profit.  At various times and places over the years, when a company had a messed-up situation they needed to be explained, I got the call.  A multinational company sent me to Brazil to deal with their untrustworthy controller.  That guy asked to be called “El-Teddy.” He lied with the ease of a Trump.  Like the ex-president, his lies were obvious and dumb.  The same company sent me to Australia to find that the IT manager was on the take.  He had about the biggest huevos of anyone in the company.  In Germany, I discovered the accountants were massaging the books.  They were playing with the sales numbers so the local management got better bonuses. It goes on from there. At this point, I think that if some company sees me coming through the door, they have probably screwed up and will not like knowing me. So that simple statement at the dinner table in 1971 turned into a weird but interesting life for a bookkeeper.