RIVIO Offers Protection Against Bogus Audit Reports

A church administrator in southwestern Pennsylvania allegedly skimmed more than $1.2 million in funds from his employer over the past seven years, in part by creating fake auditor reports to hoodwink the church’s board of trustees. That kind of fraud could have been prevented if the church or its financial institutions used RIVIO Clearinghouse, a secure online exchange for private company financial information.

David Reiter, 50, had been employed by Westminster Presbyterian Church in Upper St. Clair, Pa., for 17 years, a job that paid $69,000 in 2018. Yet the Allegheny County (Pa.) District Attorney’s office calculates that Reiter and his wife, Connie, managed to steal $1,227,423 from church accounts – including the organization’s nursery school and child care programs – from 2011 to late 2018. Those spoils allegedly paid for trips to Walt Disney World and Hershey Park, Pittsburgh Pirates tickets, music lessons for the Reiters’ children, medical expenses, and a host of other items ranging from Starbucks visits to Sirius XM radio fees, the district attorney’s office contends.

The alleged scheme unraveled when the church board’s treasurer grew impatient with David Reiter when a face-to-face meeting kept being delayed with the church auditor, identified by Reiter as “Drew Harrison” in a Pittsburgh accounting firm. The treasurer called the firm and was told no one by that name worked there.

Reiter instead offered a cell phone number to contact the auditor, according to the district attorney’s office. But it was for a prepaid phone paid out of the skimmed funds, and Reiter impersonated “Harrison” on a subsequent call with the treasurer. With questions mounting, Reiter confessed to the church’s head pastor that he had done “bad things” and needed to resign, the district attorney's office said.

Investigators later discovered the church had never been a client of the Pittsburgh CPA firm, and that Reiter had fabricated an audit report from it, as well as an earlier audit report from another firm that hadn’t been involved with the church for years.

RIVIO Clearinghouse, jointly developed by CPA.com and Confirmation, is an online financial document clearinghouse that enables private businesses to exchange key financial information with their investors and lenders, as well as retrieve information from their CPA firm, ensuring data is submitted from an authenticated source. It provides a validation process to verify that CPA firms leveraging the clearinghouse are appropriately following the stringent professional requirements to upload attested financial information.

“One of RIVIO’s key features is its ability to prevent bad actors from passing off bogus auditor reports as legitimate,” said Erik Asgeirsson, president and CEO of CPA.com. ” It takes the guesswork out of the sourcing and delivery of critical documents. In the Westminster Presbyterian Church case, the administrator wouldn’t have been able to cover his tracks so easily if RIVIO had been in use by the church or its financial institutions.”