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A new phrase has been introduced in Denmark in the field of financial crimes called ‘Company Draining’, and the Public Prosecutor of Commercial Crimes is presently investigating 2,000 cases involving considerable amounts of money (milliards of DKK). The money drained from the companies is money owed to the fiscal authorities. The method is as follows. A company closes down its business and pays its creditors. Left in the company is a sum of money owed or partly owed to the fiscal authorities but not payable until a certain date in the future due to the tax legislation.

In recent times, there has been some disquiet within certain sectors of the Singapore business community over the role of auditors in detecting corporate fraud. The cause of this concern can perhaps be attributed partly to the Barings collapse in February 1995 and the subsequent suggestions that the auditors of the Barings subsidiary in Singapore, Barings Futures Singapore Pte Ltd (BFS), may have been negligent in their audit work. More recently, in mid‐1996, a substantial locally listed company, Amcol Holdings Ltd (Amcol), was placed under judicial management amid rumours alleging possible misdeeds by senior executives and directors. The Amcol saga has, once again, focused some attention on the role of auditors and their duty to detect fraud in company accounts.