Plumbline — Forensic Accounting & Investigations

The numbers always confess.

Corporate fraud hides in the invoices, the vendors, and the expenses no one questions. Plumbline reads the records line by line and shows you exactly where the money went — with proof that holds up in court.

Request a confidential consult What we do

What we find

Most fraud isn't clever.
It's patient — and it's already in your books.

It looks like an ordinary line item until someone finally reads it closely. These are the schemes we're hired to unwind.

Phantom vendors Inflated invoicing Duplicate payments Kickbacks Expense abuse Ghost payroll Skimming Billing for work never done Vendor collusion

Practice

Six ways we get to the truth.

One discipline, applied wherever the money went. Every engagement starts with the records and ends with something you can act on.

Forensic Accounting

Reconstructing records, tracing funds, and quantifying loss when the books stop telling the truth.

Vendor & Invoice Fraud

Phantom vendors, inflated billing, and kickbacks hidden in accounts payable — matched line by line to work that was actually done.

Asset Misappropriation

Skimming, expense abuse, and ghost payroll — the slow theft that rarely shows up in any single entry.

Corporate Spend Audits

An independent read of where the money actually goes, before a suspicion turns into a lawsuit.

Litigation Support

Clear exhibits, defensible methodology, and expert testimony that holds up under cross-examination.

Fraud Risk & Controls

Closing the gaps that let it happen in the first place — so it doesn't happen to you twice.

Approach

How an investigation runs.

A forensic engagement is a sequence, not a scramble. Everything is documented as if it will be read aloud in court — because it might be.

Intake

A confidential conversation about what you're seeing and what you suspect. No commitment, no paper trail on your end.

Examine

We pull the records — ledgers, invoices, statements, systems — and read them the way the people who built the scheme hoped no one ever would.

Trace

We follow each dollar to its destination and document the path with evidence that stands on its own.

Report

Findings in plain language, with exhibits a board member, a jury, or a prosecutor can follow without an accounting degree.

Testify

When it goes to court, we're there — to explain the numbers to a judge and jury, and to defend how we found them.

Founder DL Principal Forensic Accountant

The Founder

Diane Lynn

Founder & Principal Forensic Accountant

Diane spent more than thirty years in accounting before the work found its edge. The turn came at JD Demolition, where a routine look at the books turned up thousands of dollars in fraudulent invoicing that no one else had caught — bills for work that was never done, approved and paid, quarter after quarter.

Chasing that trail — matching invoices to jobs, jobs to sites, sites to the dates they were supposedly worked — she found the part of accounting she'd been missing her whole career. Not keeping the books. Reading them.

When she finally retired, retirement didn't take. Within months she was restless, certain there were other companies quietly bleeding money to the same tired schemes, with no one looking closely enough to notice.

So she founded Plumbline — to give owners, boards, and counsel someone who would look. Today she leads a team of accountants and investigators who do exactly that.

Fraud isn't clever. It's patient. To catch it, you just have to be more patient than the person who built it. — Diane Lynn

The Team

One name on the door.
A team behind it.

Diane doesn't work alone. Plumbline's other investigators and accountants stay out of the spotlight by design — professionals who've worked both sides of the ledger.

Confidentiality is the whole point of the work. We don't put their faces on a website. We won't put yours on one either.

01Forensic CPAsFinancial reconstruction

02Certified Fraud ExaminersScheme detection

03Former Internal AuditorsControls & risk

04Licensed InvestigatorsField & asset tracing

05Data AnalystsAnomaly & pattern review

06AML / CAMS SpecialistsMoney-movement tracing

Representative Matters

What it looks like when it works.

Every engagement is confidential, so details below are anonymized. The patterns are exactly what we're hired to unwind.

Matter A — Construction

The invoices for work that was never done

A contractor's payables had been padded for years with billing for jobs that existed only on paper. We matched every invoice against site records and schedules.

Six-figure recovery · referred to counsel

Matter B — Distribution

The vendor that didn't exist

A phantom supplier had been set up inside the payment system by someone with the access to approve it. We traced the routing back to a single controlling hand.

Scheme documented · referred for prosecution

Matter C — Professional Services

The expenses that never added up

Executive reimbursements that outran any plausible business purpose, spread thin across enough categories to avoid a second look — until someone took one.

Loss quantified · settled before trial

Representative matters are composites drawn from real engagement types and anonymized to protect client confidentiality. Outcomes are illustrative and not a prediction or guarantee of results in any specific matter.

Contact

Something doesn't add up. Let's find out why.

Every conversation starts confidential and stays that way. Tell us what you're seeing — no engagement, no obligation.

ServingTucson · Phoenix · Nationwide

HoursBy appointment — discretion assured