It’s a good time to be a fraudster.

The buzz words of 2025: uncertainty, tariffs, and AI. Together, they’re making a “perfect storm for fraud” to run rampant, Andi McNeal, chief training officer at the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, recently told CFO Brew.

And this new fraud-friendly environment comes after the Covid-19 pandemic created many new fraudsters. According to McNeal, the democratization of fraud due to increased access to technology, and the financial strain from the pandemic meant that many people who never thought of committing fraud before started dipping their toes in criminal waters. Now, those newly minted fraudsters are ready to put your money where their mouth is and start scamming.

“A lot of folks realize the barrier to entry to committing fraud is so much lower now, that it makes it much more likely that you’re going to have a larger group trying it,” McNeal said.

With that in mind, experts told us that CFOs should be aware of the increasing fraud risk and start preparing employees to catch it.

Is there a wave of fraud coming?—JK

There’s been a lot of speculation about the impact that tariffs will have on companies’ bottom lines. For Stellantis, the tariff bill has come in at $350 million—and that’s for just the first half of the year.

The automaker, which owns Dodge, Ram, Fiat, Chrysler, and Peugeot in addition to Jeep, atypically decided to release unaudited financial information for the first half of the year because it was “shaping up to be worse than analyst forecasts,” according to the Wall Street Journal. Analysts had predicted a $2.2 billion profit, but Stellantis reported only $585 million. Shipments dropped 6% YoY in Q2, and the company saw a $2.7 billion loss for the first six months of the year, its worst since 2021.

Stellantis cited several factors driving the losses, including higher industrial costs, adverse foreign exchange rate changes, shuttered production capacity, and the monster wallop of US tariffs.

Chief Financial Officer Doug Ostermann said the full year impact of tariffs could climb to $1.8 billion.

For more on the impact of tariffs on Stellantis’s bottom line, click here.—JK

This story is part of our Quarter Century Project, a look back at the major events in finance and accounting over the last 25 years. Click here to read the rest of the series.

We’re sure you’ve heard the phrase “I’m moving to Canada” recently. But corporations have been pulling this move—called a tax inversion—for decades, at least on paper. But rather than a political statement—or a fondness for poutine—heading abroad helped corporations avoid billions in taxes.

Bear with us, because explaining how it works can be a mouthful. A tax inversion is a loophole in which a US-based company merges with, or acquires, a foreign company in a lower corporate tax jurisdiction and then claims to be a subsidiary of the foreign company in order to avoid paying higher US taxes.

By shifting its headquarters to another country, a business still has some US tax liability, but companies can significantly reduce their tax bills by shifting profits abroad or borrowing from the foreign parent and deducting interest payments to offset profits. According to a 2017 Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis, 60 corporations completed inversions between 1983 and 2015.

And the practice was growing: In 2014, the combined assets of companies announcing plans for inversions was $319 billion, “more than the combined assets of all of the corporations that had inverted over the previous 30 years,” according to the CBO. The Obama administration estimated that the US stood to lose tens of billions in tax revenue as the practice increased.

“The feeling in Washington, among the lawmakers and among Treasury people, was this may be technically legal, but it shouldn’t be allowed,” Alistair Nevius, former editor in chief of tax at AICPA’s magazines and newsletters in 2014, told CFO Brew.

For more on how tax inversions came to an end, click here.—JK