>>69161972Alright, you want a schizo rrat, here's one.
This is a really fucking schizo one. This isn't saying at all that the livers could do it, could just be normal management, but...
One could come up with a potential scenario where they would have to be really fucking insane, have really big balls, and JP HQ would have to be really hands-off, but even 'normal' embezzlement could be done by people in the right places. EN management has to manage the income no matter what. JP can't, because they don't know who is running what projects and when they start, hit milestones, require payment, or end. If they pass off all the responsibilities without sufficient detailed oversight, because asking people to translate every possible pertinent document for 32 livers is crazy, you need your English managers to have some autonomy - there can be a vulnerability there.
So EN gets a whole lump sum every month, minus the cut JP HQ already takes, with breakdowns of where the money is coming from for each liver (merch, SC etc) and has to divide it up, keep reserve funds for unexpected situations, send payment to third-parties for projects, then send the remainder to each liver. Fair enough.
Hypothetically if you were embezzling, you could, say, look at liver X, see that they sold 1300 keychains. You write up the receipt for them as only selling 1000, and send them the money. Now, obviously if you transferred the difference to yourself you would be fucked if an audit comes, since they know what your account is. But what if you had, say, a friend in cahoots and you sent the 300 keychain difference to that friend, split it, then wrote it down as an expense for a fake 'project for liver X'?
If you know JP doesn't care or keep close track of what EN projects are coming out for each of your dozens of livers - they expect YOU to do it, after all, that's what management is - you can, every so often, send receipts back to JP where you do the same thing over and over with varing amounts, to different accounts. Maybe the fake projects even get 'cancelled' later on because of issues in communication or whatever you want to make up. It sums up to the correct amount so JP HQ is happy because everything on the surface seems to be fine, and they already got their cut anyway. Liver X thinks they only sold that amount of merch or got that amount of SCs so they're happy. Even if JP HQ decides to check accounts, if they only cursorily look at the numbers lining up all they see is some money going to a lot of paypal accounts, of which most are legit, and the correct amount of money going to the liver.
Of course, when the talent starts ramping up on their own projects, shit gets way trickier. Someone with a brain in JP HQ might actually start to wonder why this liver has like 45 projects a year. So you need to start doing things to space it out. Deny projects, delay the agreements, delay the contracts, delay the payments so they don't all cluster up and potentially set off alarms.
This whole thing falls apart if JP actually checks and realizes the projects are made out of thin air, but that would require them to distrust EN management and go over everything their EN livers were supposed to be doing, with their own translators. Which if they're always cutting costs, seems like a very unlikely thing to do.
