Bernard Madoff’s former computer programmers created a web of simple equations to make thousands of fake transaction numbers, dates and time stamps appear realistic on documents used to trick auditors, a jury was told in the trial of five of the con man’s former top aides. The men, Jerome O’Hara and George Perez, wrote dozens of “special” programs during audits by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and HSBC Holdings Plc (HSBA), Richard Dietrich, a senior technician at International Business Machines Corp., testified yesterday in federal court in Manhattan. Prosecutors have said the programming wouldn’t have been necessary if real trading had taken place, and that the former employees knew it was fraudulent because they helped create it. More on Bloomberg BusinessWeek here.
