{"id":29666,"date":"2011-02-15T08:18:48","date_gmt":"2011-02-15T13:18:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=29666"},"modified":"2011-05-31T12:42:58","modified_gmt":"2011-05-31T16:42:58","slug":"accounting-students-track-down-the-bad-guys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2011\/02\/accounting-students-track-down-the-bad-guys\/","title":{"rendered":"Accounting Students Track Down the ‘Bad Guys’"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"<p>Firearms<\/a>
Firearms instructor Bill Skene instructs freshman Max Capeschi during a simulation exercise staged by IRS agents. Photos by Ariel Dowski<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Career fairs are often droll events, with well-dressed students visiting well-dressed company representatives sitting behind curtained tables, passing out glossy corporate marketing brochures.<\/p>\n

That wasn\u2019t the case last Friday, when the Internal Revenue Service visited campus to give UConn students a taste of what an agent of the service\u2019s Criminal Investigation Division does for a living.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a lot of fun, totally different,\u201d says Ashley Lagaca, a junior accounting major from Griswold. \u201cWe did a lot of surveillance, following the agent around all over campus.\u201d<\/p>\n

Surveillance was only one aspect of the day\u2019s event, which brought about 20 IRS agents \u2013 including four UConn alumni \u2013 to Storrs to engage in five simulated crimes. The 30 students broke out into five teams, each with an agent acting as coach and each with a crime to solve. Other agents served as role players, including the \u201cbad guys,\u201d their foils, whistle blowers, and magistrates.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt gives the students a feel for the kind of career they would have if they worked at the IRS,\u201d says Cliff Nelson, an accounting professor who helped arrange the visit, along with Beta Alpha Psi, an accounting fraternity and the event sponsor. \u201cWhat I find most interesting is that the students start the day very quiet, reluctant to talk, but they\u2019re going rapid fire by the end.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nelson\u2019s account was, indeed, correct. There were few comments or raised hands during a 30-minute introductory talk by John Collins, assistant special agent in charge of the IRS Criminal Investigation Unit\u2019s Boston field office. But as the teams began returning to the cafeteria in the School of Business Friday afternoon, the students were bubbling with excitement over their investigative work.<\/p>\n

Matt Bertelli of Clinton, a senior accounting major, was beaming as he returned to the room, his team having successfully captured \u201cChris Shots,\u201d the owner of \u201cCheaters Bar & Grill.\u201d It seems that Shots was trying to sell his bar, but had been keeping two sets of books. An informant told Bertelli\u2019s team he thought something was amiss, so the group investigated the bar, interrogated the principals, then sent two members of their group to see Shots \u2013 played by IRS special agent Sean Darling \u2013 acting as interested buyers. After their discussion, they applied for a search warrant from a judge, a role played by Maria Papageorgiou, a supervisory special agent in the IRS\u2019s Hartford office and a 2001 UConn graduate.<\/p>\n

Enforcing the search warrant, the team found both sets of books \u2013 and cash \u2013 and Shots was arrested.<\/p>\n

\"<p>UConn<\/a>
UConn accounting students come together in the School of Business cafeteria at the end of a day-long forensic accountant workshop.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cIt was great,\u201d says Bertelli, who has been accepted to UConn\u2019s business school for a master\u2019s degree in accounting. \u201cIt\u2019s exactly what I want to do. I learned about the job last year, and I\u2019ve done some basic research about it. What I saw today cements my desire to join them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Darling, the IRS special agent who played Shots, said the students did an excellent job. \u201cThey kept pounding on me, pushing me to explain why the bar was worth what I was asking when the books I was showing them didn\u2019t indicate it was a huge money maker. Finally I had to pull out the real books, and they had what they needed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lagaca, the junior from Griswold, joined a team that tracked down a man who was filing false tax returns. She, too, said she was interested in joining the IRS, but first wanted to be a public accountant for a few years.<\/p>\n

Other teams arrested a drug dealer, Roger Pothead, for money laundering; a racetrack regular, Tri Fecta, who was filing false claims; and Guy Gambler, an embezzler.<\/p>\n

This was the third year the IRS crew has brought The Adrian Project to UConn, named after Adrian College in Detroit where they first held a field day about a decade ago. The Boston office has organized it for about seven years, including the three at UConn and four at Bentley College, both of which they consider to have above average accounting programs, says Jessica Crocker, a special agent and public information officer in the IRS Criminal Investigation Unit\u2019s Boston field office.<\/p>\n

The only potential downside for the students? During the introduction, they took an oath to become special student agents, as part of which Collins, the Boston-based special agent, injected a promise \u201cto always pay my taxes.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Students get a taste of what it would be like to work for the IRS by solving simulated crimes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[37,65],"class_list":["post-29666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-07-29 01:03:34","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29666","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29666"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29666\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37554,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29666\/revisions\/37554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29666"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=29666"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=29666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}