Class teaches students how to spot fraud

[I shot, edited, then voiced this video.]

The University-Daily Kansan

To his surprise, Paul Mason saw himself on the screen. Someone had videotaped him getting his morning coffee at Panera Bread and driving to the School of Business.

Maybe next time Mason will think twice before he turns his students into crooks, teaching them how to wash checks, steal credit card information, even swindle the elderly.

Callie Reber, a master’s student from McPherson, is in Mason’s “Fraud Examination and Forensic Accounting” class. Her group did a presentation on surveillance, and couldn’t think of a better target than Mason.

They always saw him with a Panera cup in the morning, and they asked an administrative assistant near his office what time he usually got in. She said 7 a.m., so by 6:30 they were waiting at Panera, 520 W. 23rd St.

“It made me think about how I follow the same routine every day,” Reber said. “He thought it was a good way to show a real-life example of a class concept.”

The class, ACCT 741, is a graduate level class designed for people who will work with auditing. For some like Reber, who will be doing auditing for a firm in Kansas City next year, that might be a career as an auditor for a big company. But fraud is becoming more commonplace. Mason said detecting fraud “is becoming part of the accountant’s toolkit.”

“It takes a thief to train a thief to catch a thief,” Mason said. “We teach them the things that crooks do.”

From Jan. 1 to Sept. 30 in 2010 — about nine months — there were 282 counts of counterfeiting or forgery in Lawrence, according to the Lawrence police website. There were 52 counts of false pretenses or swindling, 501 counts of credit card or ATM fraud, 33 counts of impersonation, and nine counts of embezzlement.

On campus last year, there was one reported forgery and no embezzlement — better than 2001, when there were nine counts of forgery and 11 of embezzlement. And there were six cases of fraud last year on campus.

Mason said forensic accounting is one of the hottest jobs in accounting. But while it’s a problem everywhere, even rearing its head here on campus, Kansas City “is not a hotbed” for the job, with many big companies basing their fraud detection in big cities such as Los Angeles and New York City.

The class trained students broadly. It started with an overview of fraud, talking about why people steal and the art of deception. From there, it moved on to specific methods of fraud. Finally, the class broke into groups, each of which mastered a method of fraud.

The groups are giving presentations this week about the type of fraud they researched, on varying topics: surveillance, fraud gadgets, identity theft, mortgage fraud and even check washing.

“These criminals, they spend all day perfecting these techniques,” Mason said. “We arm our students with the ability to identify them.”

Katie Cox, a master’s student from St. Louis who plans to work as an audit associate for a public accounting firm, is in the class too. Her group did its presentation on health care fraud.

“I keep feeling like my grandma needs to take this class,” she said.

Her group researched ways of swindling the elderly, such as through Medicare or by providing services that people don’t need.

“It’s made me a little less naive,” Cox said. “I had several ‘aha’ moments.”

In addition to preparing students to spot signs of fraud, Mason set up the presentations in an executive format to give students practice at presenting their research professionally. He encouraged students to connect to their audience.

So Cox and her group decided to start their presentation with a classic scene from “Happy Gilmore,” where an old woman complains of pain before Ben Stiller’s character responds that her back will hurt too because she “just pulled landscaping duty.”

There isn’t any doubt that the class was interesting for its students and taught them different methods of fraud. But the question remains whether it was more interesting or terrifying.

“It was the one of the most interesting classes I’ve ever had,” Cox said.

But now Mason will have to keep checking his rearview mirror for students with videocameras. And Reber, whose group did the spying, said the class made her more suspicious, too.

“I asked for a shredder from my parents for Christmas,” Reber said.

— Edited by Clark Goble

Lawrence considers ideas for trash disposal

The University-Daily Kansan

If you’re trying to rile up someone from Lawrence — you figure talking about recycling, unemployment and parking downtown ought to do it — then bring up the city’s new discussion on trash collection.

In early September, the city council told city staff to come up with a menu of options for the future of the city’s trash collection. In late November, the staff sent the council a memo with three main choices. Now, it’s up to the city council and neighborhood associations across the city to weigh in.

“We weren’t trying to generate ‘the solution’ or ‘the right answer,’” said Tammy Bennett, assistant public works director. “We want it to serve as the basis of discussion moving forward.”

The first option is to maintain the status quo, the rear-loaded trucks that require a crew of two or three people with no requirement for citizens to rent a cart.

But the other two options propose buying new technology, such as fully automated trucks with arms to pick up carts, which typically only require a one-person crew. That means fewer trash collectors, less wages and less workers’ compensation the city has to pay out.

One of the options calls for mostly new, fully automated trucks, while the second calls for a mix of those and status quo semi-automated trucks, which would mean crews of one and sometimes two.

The new trucks also touch on a big Lawrence topic: the environment. Any move to fully automated trucks would require residents to rent a cart from the city. The carts would be available in different sizes — 35, 65 and 95 gallons — and would require people to pay more for throwing more away. That’s a positive for the green community.

Bennett said the city heard from residents who wanted the price of disposal to be related to the amount of waste, even measured by trash collectors at the curb.

“That’s really challenging from the technical perspective,” Bennett said. “Not to mention that there’s a real risk of increasing illegal dumping.”

Bennett said the cart system is more “doable” and that other cities have gone to a similar system.

Even beyond the trash collection aspect, the city staff included possible recycling options and goals for reducing waste in the memo, which will spur debate about how the city will handle recycling.

Britten Kuckelman, a junior from Wichita, said the carts might help the environment a little, but the city should be focusing on recycling.

She said the city of Wichita collected both trash and recycle bins, and her family began throwing away more things in the recycle bin than the trash.

“People will do what’s convenient,” Kuckelman said. “Right now, recycling in Lawrence isn’t convenient.”

Also, buying the shiny new trucks comes with a catch. They need space to stick out that arm and pick up the trash, so parking zones might change, especially in the tighter streets around town.

Bennett said the city could never have only fully automated trucks, because the current rear-loaded option is the only way to collect trash in areas like downtown.

Consider the ‘student ghetto,’ the area between campus and downtown Massachusetts Street. It has older, more narrow streets with dense parking.

Caroline Kraft, a junior from Tulsa, Okla., used to live in an apartment near 14th and Tennessee streets. She said parking around there is already strained by a lack of parking space.

“It’s a big problem already,” Kraft said. “The last thing we need is to reduce parking.”

She said regardless of what the city decides to do, it can’t change parking in that tight area without making things worse.

“That would be one place that may always have to have rear-loaded service,” Bennett said.

While a fully automated truck could cost as much as $230,000 — $30,000 more than the truck the city uses now — it would save money in the long term by saving on wages and workers’ compensation for trash collectors.

From 2005 to 2010 so far, the average cost of workers’ compensation for Lawrence trash collectors was more than $215,000 per year, according to the memo from city staff.

Bennett said most customers probably wouldn’t notice much difference in service between a fully automated and semi-automated trash truck. The required carts and altered parking, however, might be a different story.

It’s now up to the city to decide if it wants to start buying the new fully automated trucks, and how many it wants to buy. Neighborhood associations and concerned citizens have a chance to voice their opinion in the coming months. The city commission meets every Tuesday at 6:30 p.m.

Bennett stressed that the three options laid out aren’t final, or even exclusive. The city’s choice might be a mix of all three, or something entirely else.

“There are tons of options out there,” Bennett said. “This is just a starting point, a first step.”

— Edited by Alex Tretbar

New machine fights Lawrence potholes

The University-Daily Kansan

Irony can be expensive. Emily Strusz hit a “ginormous” pothole on Iowa Street two weeks ago — while she was driving her car to the shop for an oil change and tuneup.

“As a poor college student, you cross your fingers that this one didn’t pop your tire or bend your rim,” Strusz said.

No luck. The mechanics told Strusz, a senior from Republic, Mo., that her rim was cracked and bent. A new one cost her $150.

“I’m used to hitting potholes in this town,” she said. “Lawrence is notorious for potholes and bumps in the road.”

But Lawrence may now have a solution to its annual pothole problem — a long-lasting fix for any time of the year.

“Notorious”

If you search “Eudora, KS potholes” on Google, you get 1,500 results. For Topeka, there are 15,000 results. Going east down K-10, DeSoto has 21,000, Olathe has 19,000 and Overland Park has 37,000 Google results.

But search “Lawrence, KS potholes” and there are 80,000 results. Only Wichita has more Internet pothole buzz with 240,000 results.

Lawrence is infamous for its special winter crop, the pothole, that pops up when winter weather and snow pulls apart asphalt’s structure. That reputation has been cemented in recent years when city crews were unable to make long-lasting patches.

“People got frustrated because they saw guys throwing asphalt in a hole, driving over it and pulling away,” said Mark Thiel, assistant public works director.

They did that because they only had a cold mix blend of asphalt available, which fixed the pothole for a day or two before it needed repair again. The hot mix asphalt — which is the blend for permanent fixes — can’t be used in cold months.

In addition to its two-day lifespan, the cold mix is also limited by road conditions: It can’t be used if the ground is too wet or cold.

Thiel said that during last winter — which was particularly snowy and harsh — city crews were patching up as many as 400 to 500 holes a day with the temporary mix.

A new fix

But now the city has a new machine that allows city crews to apply a permanent fix in any month.

It’s called spray-injection patching, and it works like this: the crew clears the hole of debris, sprays oil into the hole, fills it with oily rocks, then regular rocks, and then rakes over it to try to even it out. You can tell a patch is from the new machine if it has reddish-brown rocks.

Instead of hours, Thiel expected the spray-injection patches to last months, if not years.

It can be applied while snow is still on the ground. The wetness doesn’t matter, Thiel said, only that the asphalt is above freezing temperatures.

Thiel said the traditional process could take five workers 30 minutes to fill a hole, while the new machine takes two workers five minutes, “with the same — if not better — results.”

The new machine cost $168,000, which Thiel said was closely comparable to the price tag of the traditional machines the city could have bought.

“It was an easy decision,” Thiel said.

Thiel said the city would continue to use its older cold mix technology after storms and whenever the city gets into pothole “crunch time.” The old fixes would be needed after storms to provide temporary relief until the new machine can stop by.

“It’s only one machine and we’ve got 800 miles of roadway to take care of,” Thiel said. “We obviously can’t be everywhere right away.”

But the idea is to reduce the overall amount of potholes “that pop back up after a storm,” he said, which should mean easier maintenance and quicker responses.

The city bought the machine in September and has used it since, filling up potholes across town.

“We’re trying to get ahead of the winter,” Thiel said, like a football coach talking about an old rival.

— Edited by Alex Tretbar

SIDEBAR: D&D Tire, 1000 Vermont St., receives customers with small and big pothole problems. 

Jason Climer, the shop foreman, said the immediate impact of driving over a pothole can result in a damaged tire, broken rim or problems with the car’s alignment. 

But there can be long-term effects also. If a driver allows bad alignment to go untreated, then the tires will prematurely wear out and there might be lingering steering problems. 

If a driver hits a pothole hard enough, the car’s tie-rod ends can break or take damage, Climer said, meaning safety issues for the driver. 

Report a pothole to the city with this report form. 

Pothole reporting phone number: (785) 832-3456