I wonder how quickly companies move to let the employee go after something like this. Do they offer to pay for a lawyer, or just quickly drop them as soon as there is an investigation started.

They could probably make a joke about "our accountants know how to think outside the box" but that probably wouldn't go very well at all.

If that were the case, I expect it would show differently. There was a whole thing in Seattle where someone got into accident that left their passenger dead, they escaped the hospital and headed back to their home country, while their employer kept them on the roster under "administrative leave."