Colonial Bank (United States)

[5] With the purchase of First AmFed and United Savings Bank of Anniston, Colonial ended the year with 96 branches in Alabama and Tennessee.

[8] With a mortgage operation servicing customers in 45 states, Colonial also added assets outside the Southeast, such as the Las Vegas-based Commercial Bank and FirstBank of Dallas in 1998.

Starting in 2002, Kissick, Farkas and their co-conspirators engaged in a series of fraudulent actions to cover up the overdrafts, first by sweeping overnight money from one Taylor, Bean & Whitaker account with excess in another, and later through the fictitious "sales" of mortgage loans to Colonial Bank, a fraud the conspirators dubbed "Plan B".

The conspirators accomplished "Plan B" by selling Colonial Bank mortgage loans that did not exist or that Taylor, Bean & Whitaker had already committed or sold to other third-party investors.

[15] Colonial disclosed its legal problems on August 4, 2009, stating that federal agents had executed a search warrant at its mortgage warehouse lending offices in Orlando, Florida, and that it had been forced to sign a cease and desist order with the Federal Reserve and regulators in relation to its accounting practices and its recognition of losses.

[21] The closely watched case could lead to billions of dollars in damages depending on how a jury answers a fundamental question in accounting: How much responsibility do auditors have for catching fraud?

But in a pretrial brief issued by the trustee, former PricewaterhouseCoopers chairman Dennis Nally is quoted in a 2007 Wall Street Journal article saying that the "audit profession has always had a responsibility for the detection of fraud".

[22] On March 15, 2019, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) as receiver for Colonial Bank announced a $335 million settlement with PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) related to professional negligence claims brought by the FDIC against PwC arising out of the audits of the failed Colonial Bank.