And what you are talking about here would not actually be fraud because now we get into the meat of bookkeeping.
Here's a good link:
http://www.accountingtools.com/questions-and-answers/what-is-the-accounting-for-sales-discounts.html
In short, they can easily present their backer amount as gross sales based on X product sold as Y price without reducing the amounts due to discounts or taxes
Sure, they COULD show a breakdown on discounts, tax incentives and other information but they do not have to.
And then they simply have to report the discounts so that the employee and company pay the right taxes.
It's a simplification but there is nothing illegal going on there.
That link specifically refers to sales discounts which are intended to recognise a company having structured payment arrangements in place which offer defined discounts for payment within specified periods.
In short it has nothing to do with staff discount schemes because the discounts provided by such a scheme aren't made as a result of such arrangements, they are simply a reduction in the price of the item made by reason of the buyer's employment.
If the same arrangements as you highlighted
can be applied to a simple staff discount scheme, where the discount is not offered based on early payment but is merely a benefit made available to the employee by reason of their employment you may well consider it to be merely a simplification (again strictly from an accounting perspective) and I can understand that position.
However if the full undiscounted value of a package sold under such arrangements is being published to the tracker when the actual revenue received by the company for the package would be considerably less, I'd actually call that an obfuscation since the entire purpose of the tracker is to indicate gross sales and the entire purpose of the arrangements you referred to is to
reduce the value of gross sales on the balance sheet.
The tracker is to all intents and purposes a marketing tool, not an accounting one and I think most people would reasonably assume that sales of (for example) £10,000 on there for a given day mean £10,000 of revenue received directly from sales, not (again, for example) £5,000 received due to a £10,000 package being bought at a 50% discount by an employee.
IF it's actually happening obviously - I have no idea at all whether it is or not.
Indeed.
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