The Examiner – Insights on Fighting Financial Fraud

After Thanksgiving, my family begins decorating for Christmas. We listen to Christmas music in the car and watch Christmas movies almost every night. Santa Baby by Eartha Kitt is my favorite original song; Silent Night by Harry Connick, Jr. is my favorite traditional song; and Elf is my absolute favorite movie.

A person’s clothing says a lot about them—like who they are or what they aspire to be. I don’t consider myself a fashionista, but I do like nice things. However, I’ve never been one to try and keep up with the Joneses.

Coca-Cola is one of the most recognizable brands in the world, which makes it a highly valued company. One of the company’s greatest assets is the recipe for its number one product, Coca-Cola. This recipe has remained unchanged for over one hundred years—with one big exception.

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.