I don’t know if this happens to you a lot or whether it is peculiar to my household but … I have two feet. I know this as I see them everyday. They have conveyed me faithfully over many miles. Each morning I put on two shoes and two socks, and at the end of the day I take off two shoes and two socks. The latter speed their way into the laundry basket whence the Lovely Lady of the House (LLoH)—while refusing to deal with anything that needs the touch of an iron—whisks them away on an irregular but consistent basis. On my return, post whisking away, from a hard day of forensicking—or whatever it is we do—there, laid out in orderly rows, are neatly rolled pairs of socks—and one loner.
I think even I, in my most absent-minded state, would notice wearing only one sock on any given day, so I am certain I always start with a pair. We have no dog or cat. Our occasional rodent population is limited to the odd mouse (with a very short life span as the LLoH is disinclined to share our accommodation). The prospect for a lone sock to travel outside the house without assistance is nil. It simply has to be somewhere. But a poorly organized house search will rarely turn up its mate.
I organize my searches thus:
The application of common sense will provide some starting points. Obviously one traces the route of the laundry basket in case it simply fell out. You look in the dryer as the odd sock can stick with static. Then you rely on experience to lead you to other likely spots. For example, I know from experience that the LLoH may detour while en route to the laundry room and hide the basket behind the door to what we grandly call the music room (a space off the hall where I am allowed to keep my electric guitar), so she can answer the doorbell, go to the gym or whatever else occupies her day. So I look there, and from time to time have come up with the missing sock. After that, the search needs serious extending and a game plan is required to systematically look everywhere else in the house, because if it isn’t where logic says it should be, or where your years of experience suggest it might be, it has to be somewhere else.
Forensic assignments seem to have a lot in common with this. You arrive, as it were, on the evening of laundry day. A nice, apparently orderly set of records greets you, but you have some information that doesn’t seem to match. This information, like a surprising unavailability of funds or a bank reconciliation that doesn’t, suggests some element of wrong doing, but on its own it’s useless. In fact it’s no more useful than a single sock—it just points to something going wrong. You don’t know where to look, but it has to be “in the house” somewhere. But at least you know what you are looking for, as the details have to match the otherwise incongruent information you have. I approach the task using my sock-search organizational tactics.
What brings this to mind is:
- Recently solving a forensic puzzle on the missing sock principle
- Immediately thereafter coming home to a missing sock.
The circumstance was this: We were winding up an offshore financial entity, which had all sorts of related companies with overlapping officers and directors. This entity had come up short of about three quarters of its value, when pressed by its investors. The records were maintained via custom developed and undocumented programs and databases, where very little was kept on line at any point in time; the bulk being archived on disks for which there was limited cataloging. Paper records were kept in another jurisdiction and mingled with several other entities. To mine through this to create a picture of what happened and then hopefully seek restitution was a daunting task and promised to be very expensive.
However, we had one sock. The entity had done significant business in the United States. We knew from regulators in “our” jurisdiction that U.S. professional advisors had attended, with the officers of the entity we were winding up, regulatory meetings, including one in which the “financial difficulty” had been disclosed with an explanation that, on its face was, well, sort of credible. However, application of our healthy skepticism suggested otherwise and we know from our experience of dealing with U.S. advisors that they like to paper everything, especially when things might go horribly wrong. So with the one sock we could look for its match.
This we did, not by digging into the books, but by screening emails extracted from key officers’ hard drives and literally in minutes we had the matching sock: advice from the advisor to the entity we are winding up (and specifically not its directors and officers!) in which he reiterated the scheme and cover-up, its duration and his advice on immediate and full disclosure to a wide range of parties. There are no issues of professional privilege (had there been an issue, as court-appointed liquidator we would have the power to waive privilege). And of course now we have all the details of the scheme. We know exactly where and how to extract the factual information to support our claims and establish the extent of the loss arising from these actions, all without a major ramble through the records and a painstaking reconstruction to prove our position. This has saved the investors hundreds of thousands of dollars and perhaps millions.
Of course this approach doesn’t always pay off, and sadly, all too often you are back into an expensive detailed review and reconstruction of the records and events. But this time it did work brilliantly, although I am still looking for that last loner sock—its dark blue with an argyle pattern in red and pale blue—let me know if you see it.