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....October 20, 5:46 AM |
| Accountants With Guns: IRS Trains QC Students In Real World Cases
By Ellen Thompson You’re in the middle of the Bronx with your partner, and somebody shoots him. He’s lying there on the floor in a pool of blood. What do you do?
“How do you answer a question like that,” asked Alan Fogel, a special agent with the FBI, “especially when you’re thinking you’re there for a job interview that would have you sitting behind a desk.” But that was the first question the IRS chose to ask him. And they asked it at 7:30 a.m. It was 1979 and Fogel, who had just received a degree in accounting from Brooklyn College, was looking through the New York Times classified section, when he came across a small ad for the IRS. Looking over the vague ad he thought, “why not?” He knew how to crunch numbers, so he called the number at the bottom of the ad and set up an interview. “I sat there for a few seconds considering the question. My first thought was ‘let’s get him,’ even though I was still wondering what this had to do with accounting,” Vogel recalled. “But I knew the right answer was to get help. So that’s what I said.” The next question the IRS threw at him that morning was: you walk into a room where you are supposed to interview a suspect and you see papers on a table, do you look? Vogel told the agents that he would obtrusively glance. But what if the papers were turned over they asked. Vogel said he wouldn’t do anything and the agents penned another check on his application. “Then they asked, what if I were walking into the room with my boss and he takes the papers and walks out,” Vogel explained to the three accounting students sitting before him. “So I said, well, I guess I’d have to report him. And I got another check.” Vogel didn’t know it at that point, but his 9-to-5 would no longer consist of bank consolidations and tax filings, instead, he’d be on the mafia’s tail. Drawing four pieces of paper from a white binder, Vogel turned to the Queens College and Pace University accounting students who were still enthralled by his account. “So this here is your mission for the next eight hours…,” he said. Romanticizing Accounting The three Queens College accounting students who were sitting before Agent Vogel were about to experience a whole other realm of accounting. They, along with 26 other students, gathered at Pace University the morning of Oct.13, as 100 other accounting students in three cities across the nation, came together at various other universities. Within eight hours each student would be an IRS special agent for a day. The program, which places accounting students alongside IRS special agents, was taking place in New York City for the first time thanks to a partnership between the IRS, Queens College and Pace University. It allows students a hands-on look at forensic accounting from an initial complaint to an arrest. “Being that a large percentage of our Queens College graduates happen to stay in Queens after graduating, we saw the difference a program like this could make in the borough,” explained Queens College Assistant Dean of Social Sciences John Walker. “All of this partnering is an opportunity for not only the borough to benefit, but the students as well.” “Plus, forensic accounting seems to be more and more of a demand these days,” he said. “And then we have students like Lance Hazel, a senior in the program, who have a real inquisitive side and would be perfect for this type of accounting.” The “IRS Special Agent for a Day” program takes a mock case IRS Agents would typically spend a year to two years cracking and condenses it into eight hours, giving students the opportunity to uncover clues, conduct surveillance and ultimately crack the crime. “My guess is one third of the students will fall in love with the investigation,” said Walker, who intends to bring the program to Queens in March 2007. |
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