Fraud drift

Fraud drift — the gradual slide from aggressive-but-legal toward fraudulent that happens when the goal becomes “the number” rather than the underlying asset (FTX, Theranos). It rarely starts as a decision to commit fraud; it starts as one bad year that a small misstatement could save. The structural defense is architectural, not moral: build the plan so no single year ever has to be huge — redundancy is the ethics insurance.

First used in: 5.2 · The ten breakthrough patterns