Submission + - Restaurant Owners Use Zapper to Cook the Books
Hugh Pickens writes: "The NY Times writes that thanks to a software program called a zapper, even technologically illiterate restaurant and store owners are siphoning cash from computer cash registers to cheat tax officials including a 12-store restaurant chain in Detroit that used a zapper to skim more than $20 million over four years. Zappers — also known as automated sales suppression devices — are a new twist on an old fraud. In the old days, restaurant owners who wanted to cheat on taxes kept two sets of books but because cash registers make automated records, hiding the theft requires getting into the machine's memory and changing that record. The more sophisticated zappers are easy to use: a dialog box shows the day's tally then the thief chooses to take a dollar amount or percentage of the till and the program calculates which orders to erase to get close to the amount of cash the person wants to remove. Richard T. Ainsworth, a Boston University law professor specializing in taxes says only two known zapper cases have been prosecuted in the United States. ""Why aren't cases being identified in the United States? This is my tax money. It makes me mad.""
