In accounting there’s the concept of immateriality, a quantity of money that’s just not that important. So if you’ve got a million dollar company and you find your books are off $10, it’s not worth the cost to figure out what went wrong, you go with the cash on hand and move on.
The NFL salary cap is $224 million. Plus of course all the other things a team has to pay for. And the revenues that come in to make every team profitable. So you’ve got a company here that’s cycling around half a billion dollars in and out over the course of the year. $5.5 million (what he averaged per year) just ain’t material in that. Heck $22 million straight up barely rates.
WorldCom
Enron
Now those were BIG companies.
But $22 million of fraud is hard to hide from auditors. People knew, and had reason to know. I saw a case where some mid-level employee stole about $250k over 20 years; this got exposed in the early 1980s.
It is very surprising all the controls that are missing in so many organizations.
The claim about “materiality” was waved around in the 1970s when Congress passed the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in response to bribes paid overseas by international companies.