LAPPING SCHEME

A fraudulent accounting practice of altering the accounts receivable section of the balance sheet by overlapping the succeeding receivables. The method begins when someone took the first receivable collected and used it to cover the theft. Then the receivable from the second transaction was accounted to the first one, the third collectible to the second, so on and so forth.

Initially, this may be a good way to account the theft in a company. But eventually, the firm must account it as a loss and subtract it from the net income.