Reference no: EM131474303

Wayne and Bryan Heldreth are brothers who often engage in shady business deals and regularly swindle honest people out of their money. Wayne and Bryan have decided to take their business to a new level. There is a small hardware store in town with a good reputation for honesty and friendly service. With the large amounts of money they have accumulated from other schemes, Wayne and Bryan decide to buy the hardware store. They make the owner an offer he can't refuse, and they are soon in the hardware business. As new managers of the store, Wayne and Bryan make some changes. They begin to order bigger shipments from suppliers, paying them off promptly, using money acquired through loans. They sell off a lot of these shipments at cost to their unruly friend, Buck Aroo. As orders get larger and payments remain prompt, the suppliers are willing to extend more and more credit to the hardware store. Also, because it appears that business is good, the bank is willing to lend more money.

Things are going as planned for Wayne and Bryan. Just as they had intended to do all along, when they have a lot of money on loan from the bank and have just sold huge amounts of inventory to Buck that they had purchased on credit, they file for bankruptcy. The suppliers and the bank are perplexed. Upon investigation, they find that Wayne and Bryan have neither the money to pay them back nor the inventory to liquidate in order to pay them. Wayne and Bryan have successfully "sold" their inventory or hidden their cash in other bank accounts, so it appears they don't have the means to pay back their creditors.

Who would be the MOST LIKELY individual or entity to detect this activity, and how, before it gets to the point of damaging suppliers and lenders?