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Lopp to Serve on National American Institute of CPAs Accredited in Business Valuation Credential Committee

July 11, 2019 by Admin

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CHRISTOPHER LOPP TO SERVE ON NATIONAL AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF CPAS ACCREDITED IN BUSINESS VALUATION CREDENTIAL COMMITTEE

TULSA, OK (July 11, 2019) – Financial Forensics and Investigations Group is proud to announce its founder, Christopher Lopp, will serve on the American Institute of CPAs’ (AICPA) Accredited in Business Valuation (ABV) Credential Committee for the 2019-2020 year.

The national ABV Credential Committee helps develop and maintain the qualification requirements and exam for credential applicants. In this role, Lopp will serve as a technical advisor for education offerings, assist in developing and maintaining efforts to recruit and retain credential holders; and work to raise awareness of the ABV credential and the credential holder’s role in valuation services.

Lopp is a financial forensics expert who provides litigation support and expert witness services, specializing in business valuations, commercial damages calculations, class action certification, personal injury and wrongful death damages, and fraud investigations. He has provided expert reports, litigation consulting, and expert testimony in depositions, trials, and administrative hearings, at the state and Federal court levels. He is currently Chairperson of the Oklahoma Society of Certified Public Accountants Business Valuation, Forensics, and Litigation Support Committee.

Lopp is a CPA / MBA with over 21 years of experience in financial management, strategic planning, business valuation, litigation support, and mergers and acquisitions transaction support and has previously served as the team leader for the litigation support practice of a large regional public accounting firm. He graduated from the University of Tulsa with a B.S.B.A. with a major in Accounting and a minor in economics and an MBA with an emphasis in Finance. He is currently a J.D. candidate at The University of Tulsa College of Law.

For more information about Chris Lopp and/or Financial Forensics and Investigations Group, please e-mail [email protected].

When Do you Need a Financial Expert?

June 7, 2019 by Admin

A Financial Forensics expert can assist a lawyer by providing services on many issues which are common and readily come to mind:

Business Valuations – Utilizing historical financial records and proprietary databases to form an opinion of the value of a business for marital dissolution, partnership disputes, or a variety of other types of cases
Marital Dissolution – In addition to business valuations, opinions on the breakdown of personal vs. enterprise goodwill of the business, money tracing, the evaluation of expenditures, and the valuation of other assets and debts
Valuation of damages in civil litigation – Opinions on a variety of economic damages related to tort or breach of contract claims including lost profits, quantifying a business interruption loss, providing values for shareholder or partnership disputes, calculation of damages related to failure to perform on a contract or the net loss when having to obtain substitute performance
Personal Injury cases – Opinions of the value of actual damages, lost wages including fringe benefits, or calculating the net present value of a life care plan
Wrongful death – Calculating a value using data such as actuarial tables for work life expectancy, life expectancy, personal income, personal consumption, and value of household services to survivors
Wrongful termination cases – Calculating the lost wages and benefits to the terminated employee
Fraud Investigations – Coming into companies where fraud is suspected, conducting a quantitative data review and interviews of personnel to determine the scope of fraudulent activities, amount of loss, and detailing the methods utilized to perpetrate the fraud, preserving evidence in a manner to be presented to law enforcement if requested; a fraud investigation is significantly different that an audit and takes a different skill set
Bankruptcy cases – Opinions regarding the feasibility of reorganization plans, solvency issues, identifying fraudulent transfers, administration of and accounting for the reorganization plan or liquidation

If you’re looking for a financial expert, give us a call at 918-814-2309 or
e-mail [email protected].

Hidden Areas that Need the Help of a Financial Forensic Expert

February 28, 2019 by Admin

There are a number of other areas where Financial Forensics experts can assist that may not be as obvious. Here are just of few examples from my recent experience:

Shareholder or Partnership Litigation – Outside the traditional values needed to compensate a departing partner, there are often accusations of fraud, misappropriation of funds, loss of corporate opportunities and a host of other issues that lawyers frequently encounter, but don’t involve the financial expert early enough.
Alter Ego Analysis – Involves analyzing the (likely near bankrupt) company that may have breached the contract or committed the tort for undercapitalization (while being subsidized by an entity under common control), transfers between related entities, commingling of assets, operations, or personnel, following corporate formalities, documentation of intercompany loan agreements, analysis of deals to determine if they are on an arm’s length basis and other similar activities designed to determine if there is the potential to “pierce the corporate veil” and have defendants with the ability to pay damages
Fraud Prevention – Certified Fraud Examiners are trained to go into company and assess the risk of fraud, looking throughout the company processes, from payroll to accounts payable and receivable, procurement, sales, company credit cards, cash management procedures and other areas as applicable to the business, also working with management to recognize the red flags of fraud early.
Class Action Certification / Claims analysis – often involves the analysis of large data sets to determine empirically whether the potential claims of the plaintiffs are similar to warrant class certification
Ability to pay punitive damages – form an opinion as to whether and how much the defendant has the ability to pay based upon the prevailing criteria of the jurisdiction
Valuation of Stock Options / Restricted Stock in private companies – often associated with marital dissolution cases, but this is a specialized area with complex calculations that require a great deal of backup data from proprietary databases, especially when start-up companies are involved
Intellectual Property Valuation – Utilized for purchase price allocation for financial accounting purposes, but also can be a measure of value or damages in marital dissolution, shareholder disputes, or many forms of civil litigation

If you think you might need the help of a financial forensics expert, please call 918-814-2309 or e-mail [email protected].

What is Financial Forensics?

February 25, 2019 by Admin

The term Financial Forensics is a relatively new term used to describe expert witnesses that possess a much broader set of skills and capabilities than have traditionally been associated with Forensic Accounting. Black’s Law Dictionary defines Forensic Accounting as the “application of accountancy principles to monetary issues that arise in courts, as in the apportionment of funds and of financial responsibilities upon a divorce or dissolution of a partnership.” (10^thed. 2014).

According to Black’s, this definition first appeared in 1946 and the scope of services for the financial expert has expanded significantly since that time. Black’s also defines an expert witness by summarizing the Rule 702 of the Federal Rules of Evidence as someone “qualified by knowledge, skill, experience, training, or education to provide a scientific, technical, or other specialized opinion about the evidence or a fact issue.”

Financial Forensics has evolved into a science itself, along with other evidence-based sciences, such as toxicology or ballistics. This science is based upon data, quantitative data including large data sets from corporate records, from databases of companies or assets that have sold, from actuarial tables, from stock and bond market data, and a variety of other sources. It also includes qualitative data that may be gathered from case law or statutory research, depositions, from conducting interviews of the owners, managers, and employees of a company, or from discussions with the family of a victim.

A qualified Financial Forensics expert needs the skills of a private investigator to be able to properly investigate people, companies, industries, and money. The traditional CPA, whose background involves spend the majority of their career preparing tax returns or performing financial statement audits background is not well suited to perform these services without a great deal of additional training and experience.

Understanding the capabilities and of a well-qualified financial forensic expert can provide advantages in helping your clients solve their problems successfully, whether it involves litigation, internal corporate issues, or determining appropriate damages to pay or receive to avoid litigation.

If you think you might need a Financial Forensics expert, please call us at 918-814-2309.

Knowing When to Walk Away

November 6, 2017 by Admin

I will admit I enjoy the art of the deal very much. Putting deals together, the negotiation, the due diligence, the renegotiation, and everything that it takes to get a deal across the finish line to a completed merger or acquisition. That is fun.

Often you see success as getting the deal closed. But I’ve seen over time that often success is helping your client avoid the bad deal. Letting a deal die because it wasn’t going to end well is often the best for both parties.

That happened last week. I was advising a seller who wanted to maximize the selling price for sure and exit the business. However, this seller also cares very much about what happened to the business after the closing and the legacy of success being continued. In round after round of due diligence requests it became apparent that this buyer had gotten lost in immaterial details of the companies history and financial results, but wasn’t asking any questions about the future (or really the present) and was not spending any time on thinking about how to grow, much less maintain the business after closing. It wasn’t going to be a success.

Good transaction work does the due diligence to ensure the cash flows the buyer is expecting are real, that contracts are valid and assignable, that the company doesn’t have problems with its intellectual property rights, that there is not a minefield of employee relations or tax issues that will come around to bit the buyer in the future. However, good transaction work also ensures that the buyer understands the business they are buying and has a plan for addressing the employees the day of the closing, for operating the business the day after closing, for growing the business during the 100 days after closing, and for the capital needs in the years after closing and has thought through the moves that will need to be made when the inevitable changes occur that throw that 5 year plan into obsolescence.

Often the best work is done on deals that don’t close and helping a client spot a potential disaster and walking away is just as valuable as helping get a good deal closed. Sometimes that disaster can occur because of business issues, but it can also be because the buyer is not right for the business. This business will sell and making sure it sells to the right buyer and at a fair price to the seller is success.