A former IT manager for Livent, the Canadian theater company currently embroiled in a high profile fraud case, recently admitted that he knowingly altered the company's accounting system to cover his vice president's tracks.

Former Livent IT Manager, Raymond Cheong, testified in the Ontario Superior Court about his involvement with changes made to the Lawson accounting system used to record the company's financial transactions. Cheong altered the theater production company's program so staff could reverse transactions without leaving behind any evidence of the entry. Cheong also stated that the transactions could then be re-entered in a different time period or posted to a different account.

In 1990 before the company went public, Gordon Eckstein, senior Vice President of Finance, ordered the first changes to be made to the program. Cheong testified that this went on for several more years and he also received orders to alter the dates of invoices posted to the system by corporate controller, Diane Winkfein.

Cheong agreed that co-founders Garth Drabinsky and Myron Gottlieb had no access or knowledge of the computerized accounting system because they could not use computers. Drabinsky and Gottlieb pleaded not guilty to fraud and forgery at Livent. They are accused of misreporting Livent's finances between 1993 and 1998. Cheong also stated that during the years at Livent he was the target of Eckstein's verbal abuse and Drabinsky's aggressive tone.

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