WorldCom said in a statement filed with the S.E.C. last week that the board had fired Mr. Sullivan after an internal auditor uncovered the accounting irregularities in May.

In 1998, independent auditors under contract with the Health Department uncovered irregularities at Parkshore.

In a typical example, auditors uncovered the award of almost $1 million in construction contracts by the Nassau County Health Care Corporation without the competitive bidding the corporation's own rules required.

Mr. Conahan emphasized that auditors had not uncovered any fraud or abuses in the program.

It would be nice if it turned out that the auditors had uncovered the problem and taken the matter to the audit committee.

Bankers Trust's diversion of unclaimed funds "is one of the more egregious abuses my auditors have uncovered," he added.

Though auditors uncovered a total of $11.2 million in fraud, investigators were able to bring prosecutions in connection with only about $7 million of those losses.

Internal auditors had uncovered a huge financial bet that appeared to be going disastrously wrong.

A report released Tuesday said that Olympus's executives had so cleverly buried losses that the company's external auditors could not have uncovered them.

After auditors uncover their schemes, Lay encourages them to "keep making us millions".