0:05
So my expectation through the couple years was that I would be steadily increasing
salary-wise, and it just wasn't increasing at the rate I expected,
and I'm not normally that type of person anyway.
I really feel like my boss is always gonna take care of me.
If I do a good job, which I try my best to do,
that I should never have to worry about it.
In most cases, I haven't had to.
In this case, it was just frustration, so
I get this in the mail from the IRS.
This probably started in 95.
A huge delinquency of 15,000, $14,000, something like that.
The normal control of checks and balances that a company puts in place,
Power just didn't do that, and it was rampant across the board.
It wasn't just accounting.
It was inventory.
It was sales.
It was so wide open, it was pretty scary,
and, quite frankly, I've told them and my staff had told them many,
many times that we're doing things we shouldn't be doing.
I've been here over a year and kept the company afloat basically,
me and my staff, and really felt like we did a good job, and
I made sure all of my employees were rewarded well, so
my expectation was a lot higher of what I thought would happen to me.
I had a terrible review, terrible raise, and so I was really upset.
I finally get some notices in the mail, that their fixing to garnish wages and
levy liens against the house and stuff like that.
So I'm in one of these scared modes where I don't know where to turn.
I can't turn to my family.
My family doesn't have that kind of money, so
I can't turn to them nor would I probably want to turn to them,
just not that way, so I called a friend of mine up.
Larry and I have been friends for years.
I said, hey, can you loan me some money?
He said, yeah, I can loan you some money.
After I got the money, it's like, okay, I need my money back.
2:24
Well, I don't have the money.
He said, well, maybe you can find something within the company that we can
work on, some scrap parts or some obsolete materials or some stuff like that.
I said I don't deal in that stuff anymore.
I can turn you on to the person that does, and you can call and talk to them,
but I can't do any of that.
We battered back and forth.
Well, I can't do that.
Then you get another threatening letter from the IRS.
You get this two percent raise that you expected and eight percent.
All that compounds everything clouds your judgment, and you finally just say,
the hell with it.
Okay, I'll send you some stuff.
Then you send them something, and it's like, well, now I've got some.
Now I need more.
So you just do it, create an order, put it in there, saved it, press the button.
Everything started, I just let everything go, flow.
I didn't do anything else unique to make it happen.
I was just the guy down in the warehouse,
printed out something that said this on it, and he went and executed to it.
Shipped them off, and things were done.
Nobody else in the world wants these but Power Computing, so
they're built specifically for power.
3:45
All that, so, if you try to sell anything back to Power, it's gonna be pretty
obvious that you got them from some source that you shouldn't have gotten them from.
He said, well, I don't care to do that,
all I wanna do is take the memory chips off and I'll sell the DRAMS.
Or the memory chips by themselves.
It didn't sound like there was any reason anyone needed to go do any
investigation without someone calling saying, here, I got some parts,
I wanna sell them to you cheap.
4:15
>> Literally just called Randy Pierce out of the blue.
Hi, I'm [BLEEP] with the Austin Police Department, and
we got a problem Power Computing.
He said he was aware of it, and what I often tell people, and
I think this is really the truth, I just think they've made a mistake.
I'm not gonna come out and tell someone you're a bad person, you're a crook,
you're a thief, you're a liar, because why would they want to speak to me much longer
after I've spoken to them in that manner?
>> He told me who he was and he said, would you like to talk about this thing?
And, of course, I said, I don't know what you're talking about.
[LAUGHS] So he just said,
it might make you feel better if you could get things off your chest.
I said, well, I don't have anything to get off my chest,
of course, and it was just shakes.
It was like, I didn't know what to do,
didn't know what to say, so I just pleaded stupid for a while.
Then, of course, gave me a couple of days to think about it, called me back and
told me, he said, yeah, you're right.
It's going to make me feel a hell of a lot better to just get this off my chest
because it's just been killing me anyway.
So then, a lot of normal check and balances you have in a company, whether it
be accounting checks and balances, whether it be inventory checks and balances,
a lot of those just did not exist, but they were real sloppy so,
in reality, anybody could enter an order.
I've offered to pay back everything.
5:45
Whatever they want,
I have already told them whatever you come up with is what I deserve.
State on the camera that it's Power Computing's fault, or it's the IRS's
fault, or it's Larry Reid's fault, or any of that stuff, it's not, it's my fault.
What I did, I did by myself, and I take responsibility for my actions.
After finally dealing with them,
I finally got it resolved with IRS in 98.
It's an error on their part.
They owed me $2,000.
Dr. Richard Riley, Ph.DLouis F. Tanner Distinguished Professor of Public Accounting
Dr. Richard Dull, Ph.DGoMart Professor in Accounting Information Systems
John Gill, J.D., CFEVice President - Education
