The Examiner – Insights on Fighting Financial Fraud

This blog is the fifth in the series, Fighting Fraud Requires Anticipatory Skills.

There are significant changes happening that will impact the way we operate in the future. These changes include software that will automate a significant number of the tasks we perform during an investigation. Will it be possible to automate fraud fighting and make the fraud fighter irrelevant? Will human fraud fighters be replaced 5, 10, or 20 years from now? If we don’t embrace change, we could find ourselves out of a job.

This blog is the fourth in the series, Fighting Fraud Requires Anticipatory Skills.

The future is full of surprises—some are small, while others are huge. The firing of LSU football head coach Les Miles was a surprise to the LSU community and one that few people could have predicted a year ago. After this change, the Tigers’ future looked brighter as their offense improved and they won their next three games.

This blog is the third in the series, Fighting Fraud Requires Anticipatory Skills.

I sought a great quote about predicting the future, but had difficulty finding the right one. Then I remembered back to my childhood days and the movie series, Back to the Future. The following quote was from the end of the first movie that foreshadowed the sequel:

This blog is the second in the series, Fighting Fraud Requires Anticipatory Skills.

Disrupters are changing our world. Those who are threatened by the disrupters are the disrupted. The government even plays a role in this process of change and is sometimes forced to respond. In some cases, people see the government’s role as putting up road blocks to slow the disruption. 

For many years, we have used computers to help fight fraud. These are tools that we leverage to find, investigate, and prevent fraud. We weld IDEA and Excel as if they were our sword and shield in the fight against fraud. We train between fights. We learn from every battle and take those experiences into future battles. The best fraud fighters understand their enemies—they know how to think like a fraudster.

In the account reconciliation series introduction, I made a promise that I didn’t keep. I stated, “I will compare each of the above areas to games that we may have played as kids or adults.” If you read the series, you know that I didn’t bring up any games and it was fairly technical. I am sorry, but I saw no other way to cover the information.

This blog is the fourth in the series, Account Reconciliation as a Control.

As we close out this series, I will share with you a story that forced me to pull the trigger and write about this topic. I hope this story hammers home the point—account reconciliations are important.

This blog is the third in the series, Account Reconciliation as a Control.

This blog series was developed to address the issues I have seen in the account reconciliation process. As you can imagine, I have seen plenty of pitfalls. Some were smaller than others, but there were several that were complete failures. What if you discovered someone stole almost $100,000 over several years?

This blog is the second in the series, Account Reconciliation as a Control.

The account reconciliation is an effective procedure that can help an organization identify fraud and errors, but the review is the step that makes the procedure an internal control. If it isn’t reviewed, then it isn’t a control. With this blog, I hope you see the importance of performing a review, and that you find a few tips that will help you perform an effective review.

This blog is the first in the series, Account Reconciliation as a Control.

I hate to insult people’s intelligence by covering this topic, but it is amazing the number of people who perform reconciliations incorrectly. This blog post is intended to educate rookies and seasoned veterans.