The truth of what he had stolen did not live only in one set of records on one aircraft.

It lived in the gap between what the airline had paid for and what it had actually received, and that gap existed whether or not anyone looked at it, the way a hole in a hull exists whether or not the crew has noticed the water.

An audit does not create the shortfall.

It only finds the shortfall that was always there.

He could have crashed the airplane and the arithmetic would still not have balanced, and some other auditor, some other year, would still have run their finger down the same two columns and found them refusing to agree.