Howard Klein

About

Howard Klein ’75 has lived in Cleveland his entire life, other than a 6-year detour to Oxford and Columbus. He chose Miami University because it had the best business school in the state. While at Miami, Howard was a member of the social fraternity Sigma Alpha Epsilon, serving as treasurer and then president. He was also a member of the accounting fraternity, Beta Alpha Psi. After graduation, he pursued a Master’s degree in Accounting at The Ohio State University and passed the CPA exam.

Howard’s career started at Ernst & Ernst, where he worked as an auditor for 5 years. That role provided him insight into a variety of interesting companies: a retail department store, national bank, grocery store chain, a Fortune 500 mining company, and several small businesses. His last engagement turned into a forensic investigation that resulted in a trial, where he spent 5 days in court explaining a massive fraud. After the trial, he left Ernst and became a partner at a local accounting firm that became SSK&G (the K being Klein), where he continued to perform forensic accounting. After 5 years at SSK&G, Howard decided to go solo and concentrate solely on being a forensic accountant. In 2013, he joined the regional accounting firm of Skoda Minotti, which merged into Marcum LLP in 2019, where he currently serves as partner.

Since 1988, Howard has been engaged mainly on litigation support projects, investigating a variety of frauds, including bank frauds, Ponzi schemes, embezzlements, fraudulent financial statements, related party transactions, check kiting schemes, lapping of receivables, successor business frauds, alter-ego frauds, and bankruptcy frauds. He also expanded his litigation support to include business disputes, economic damages, business valuations, and marital dissolutions. His career led him to work on the Enron bankruptcy for 3 years; most recently, he was the forensic accountant for the trustee in the Fair Finance bankruptcy (Akron, OH), a $200 million Ponzi scheme.

“I enjoy the objective role I play as an expert witness in our adversarial judicious system. Through the adversary process, each side in a dispute has the right to present its case as persuasively as possible to a judge or jury, who then decides in favor of one side or the other. As an expert witness, my opinions are objective, unbiased, and based on the facts of the case.  Each case is a new experience and brings new challenges. I find it invigorating to present my opinions and findings to a judge or jury. After many hours of poring through documents, working with counsel, developing my opinions, testifying at depositions, I find it very rewarding when a case settles in my client's favor or the case is won at trial. It is especially rewarding when my work results in a criminal conviction of a wrongdoer.”