Sam Hewitt is a CPA with over 40 years of experience in forensic accounting, financial management, information technology, and public accounting. Mr. Hewitt has been with GlassRatner since 2002, following over twenty years in the insurance industry and at a Big 4 audit firm. His corporate experience enhances the services he provides assisting clients with business disputes, pre-transaction investigations, post-transaction disputes, internal investigations, financial statement reconstruction, and interim financial management.
Much of Mr. Hewitt’s practice deals with disputes, both before and after litigation is initiated, as a forensic accountant providing testifying expert witness and consulting expert services, performing internal investigations, and analyses for post-transaction disputes.
His expert forensic accounting, internal investigation and post-transaction dispute engagements have included:
- Plaintiff’s expert resulting in recoveries from universal life insurers and other industries in several class actions
- Defense expert for several class actions involving Fair Credit Report Act matters including judgments and accident reports
- Rebutting damages for legal malpractice claims in several industries.
- Post-transaction working capital dispute for a large European energy company regarding the sale of subsidiaries.
- Rebutting claims against failed insurance companies accused of fraudulent transfers and mismanagement.
- Assisting in obtaining recoveries due to audit malpractice for failed insurance companies.
- Several domestic and Caribbean governmental units regarding various charges of public corruption, including mismanagement of construction projects, and determining reasons why a Caribbean nation’s massive public bailout of financial institutions owned by a multinational private company was required.
- Investment fund limited partners investigations of the management of the funds.
- Investigating the management and accounting practices of private equity owned investee companies, three times leading to a subsequent interim CFO role.
Mr. Hewitt is a leader in the firm’s Deals & Diligence practice:
- Both assisting sellers to prepare for a transaction or to go public; and reporting on the seller’s status to the market.
- Investigating and providing quality of earnings and other assessments of a target company to both investors and lenders.
- Some financial investigations assess making additional investments in current investees or whether to continue the current lending relationship.
- Other investigations are to assess the viability of a SPAC’s target business.
A common theme in many of Sam’s cases is “Big Data”, where massive amounts of financial information must be groomed, stratified, distilled and analyzed to determine facts critical to the case. Sam manages the firm’s data analytics team.
Sam is often engaged on the out of the ordinary. Some examples:
- He has excelled at helping companies recover from failed system conversions and restating flawed financials to GAAP.
- Projecting cashflows for seven purchases aggregating $1.3 billion of gross consumer receivables for three clients and then monitoring the cashflows until sold.
- Valuing non-financial remedies in class action settlements.
- Valuing litigation claims against a hedge fund that failed spectacularly on a Euro/Swiss France currency exchange derivative transaction to allow the orderly liquidation of the hedge fund.
- Providing a state legislature with tools to measure the effectiveness of state executive agencies.