The Examiner – Insights on Fighting Financial Fraud

Moving along the anti-fraud maturity (AFM) curve will improve your organization’s culture and increase profitability. This shift in culture helps you fight internal and external fraud, protect against cybercrime, and remain compliant with regulatory demands.

I was invited to present this week at AICPA Controllers Conference, where I also presented two years ago. My first presentation was a four-hour workshop about real-life fraud and the second presentation covered the Anti-Fraud Maturity Curve (AFM Curve). The participants learned about the significant impact fraud has on the organizations and people involved—from the loss of human life to millions of dollars stolen.

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.

I have a technology dilemma that is going to catch up with me soon if I don’t do something about it. Our family has used PCs with Windows operating systems since we purchased our first home computer. When the iPhone came out, we decided to take a step toward the Apple world. Moving through the years from the iPhone 3 to the iPhone 6S and adding a couple of iPads and an Apple TV along the way, we are now stuck between worlds. This isn’t all bad because the technology works fine together. It just isn’t as seamless as it could be.

No matter how “good” a kid is, they will get into trouble. It is a fact of life. It is how we learn. When they are toddlers, they may use a marker to write on their baby sibling. As a 4 or 5 year old, they may cut their sibling’s hair or their own.

When I think of a small company, I think of the “mom and pop” business. This type of company usually starts as an idea and grows enough to sustain the income of the owner(s) and their family members. They grow from a few hardworking individuals, usually just the owners, to eventually hiring employees to help run the company. They treat their employees like family, and in some cases, they are family. These companies and their employees are a huge part of the United States economy.