Madoff will keep forensic accountants busy

NEW YORK, Dec. 22 (UPI) -- Forensic accountants will be kept busy -- very busy -- by a New York case involving a potential $50 billion Ponzi scheme, experts said.

"I imagine there will be many, many layers of transactions," Ken Yormark, a forensic accountant at New York consultancy LECG, told The Christian Science Monitor.

The metaphors accountants use indicate how complicated the case involving Bernard Madoff Investment Securities LLC could be.

Larry Crumbly, a professor of accounting at Louisiana State University said an accounting investigation resembled making sense of a bowl of spaghetti. "You look at a strand and don't know where it starts and ends," he said.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has 500 to 600 forensic accountants, the newspaper said. Some start by looking at the current state of a company's books and working backwards.

"You will have to take each person's account and follow the money bit by bit," said Roger Nearmyer, president of the Forensic Accountants Society of North America.

Accountants may be able to recover some of the $50 billion Bernard Madoff allegedly swindled, but, "people will have to prove the investment dollars they put in," Nearmyer said.