When I was a young and naive c-level exec (CTO), the CEO of the company was lying about the numbers to investors and everyone else, but neither me or the coo noticed as we thought it was not our concern; we were doing our jobs which was not finance. While the judge gave us a slap on the wrist only when the company suddenly turned out to have no money, he said it was definitely part of our job to at least validate the numbers. But I know enough people now who will say it is not their job and if the ceo signed off, it is enough for them. So I can see it happen. We had clients (big ones) and we were just not privy, nor interested to be fair, to the contract size. The changes were things like 800k$ product sale heightened to 1.8m etc which was not really unlikely to us or investors. We should have checked...