Italian police on Tuesday arrested the son and a daughter of jailed Parmalat founder Calisto Tanzi in a widening probe into Europe’s largest white-collar crime.Stefano Tanzi, president of the soccer club owned by Parmalat, also sat on the board of Parmalat Finanziaria, the holding company of the failed food group. Stefano's elder sister, Francesca Tanzi, headed the Tanzi family's tourism business Parmatour.

Enron had a code of conduct. Enron had a hotline. And in the end, Enron had fraud. Today, companies operate with a false sense of security because they either don't have a fraud prevention program or the program they have is a legal, yet ineffective "fig leaf." "One key to fraud prevention is to create an atmosphere where employees feel confident in reporting wrongdoing without being victimized, even if executives appear to be involved," explains Toby Bishop, president & CEO of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE), the largest anti-fraud association in the world.

As part of its effort to combat abusive tax shelter schemes and transactions, the IRS launched a new section on IRS.gov containing important information about abusive schemes involving employee retirement plans.

Return Preparer Fraud generally involves the preparation and filing of false income tax returns by preparers who claim inflated personal or business expenses, false deductions, unallowable credits or excessive exemptions on returns prepared for their clients. Preparers may also manipulate income figures to obtain fraudulent tax credits, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit.In some situations, the client (taxpayer) may not have knowledge of the false expenses, deductions, exemptions and/or credits shown on their tax returns.

First there was the chief executive officer and the chief financial officer. With scandals and fraud came the advent of the chief accountability officer and the chief ethics, knowledge, regulatory and disclosure officers, to name a few. Technology brought us the chief information officer.

Ware Enterprises and Investments Inc., which targeted blacks and Christians as well as nearly 20 NFL players, is nothing more than a Ponzi scheme, the Securities and Exchange Commission said Tuesday as it acted to shut down the Orlando-based investment firm.The SEC said the company got more than 600 people to invest about $16.5 million over three years by using religiously oriented pamphlets to attract vulnerable groups, the SEC said in its complaint.

Freddie Mac officials testified before the House Financial Services subcommittee on government-sponsored enterprises and let lawmakers know that the agency expects to spend upwards of $200 million to correct accounting problems that led to a $5 billion restatement of earnings last year.Freddie Mac, the nation’s No. 2 mortgage finance company, replaced its top three executives last June in the wake of an accounting investigation.

Andrew Fastow’s alleged partner in Enron crime pleaded not guilty yesterday to six criminal charges handed up in an indictment by a federal grand jury looking into the collapse of what was the nation’s seventh largest company.Richard A. Causey, 44, who was the energy giant’s chief accountant during the years in which massive fraud allegedly occurred, is accused of five counts of securities fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud.

State securities regulators forecast that investors will be challenged with increasingly complex and confusing investment frauds and identified the Top 10 schemes investors are likely to see in 2004. New to the NASAA annual survey of state securities enforcement officials are mutual fund practices, senior investment fraud, and variable annuities.“Investors face a complex maze of scams, schemes and scandals," said Ralph A. Lambiase, NASAA's president and director of the Connecticut Division of Securities.