The Examiner – Insights on Fighting Financial Fraud

The Examiner blog is a tool developed to help fight fraud by reminding people that fraud is a risk and providing useful tips to help prevent, discover, and investigate it. HORNE also has the HORNE Cyber blog. Fighting fraud and cybercrime have numerous similarities, some of which are included below:

Next week I will be presenting at a conference to a group who fight fraud every day. They focus on evaluating insurance claims for potential fraud. This conference provides them the opportunity to sharpen their saws and collaborate with others.

If you didn’t watch the game this past Sunday, you probably heard about it. The Patriots pulled off the greatest comeback in Super Bowl history. I am not about to rehash a discussion about the Super Bowl, but I do want to talk about the whistleblowers—the referee and other officials who make sure everyone follows the rules of the game. The crew officiating this year’s Super Bowl received an “A” for a job well done.[1]

I listened to my first podcast about two weeks ago, and it was very informative. Just like that, I was hooked! Podcasts have replaced my audiobooks when driving and my music when running. They help me grow to be a better person. I am not sure what took me so long to join the podcast world.

I frequently present to audiences about fraud and ways to prevent it—like implementing internal controls. I even developed an entire training about trust versus control, which covers this concept of trusting employees versus implementing controls.

In last week’s blog, I promised to provide some ideas on how auditors and auditees can work together to find fraud. I will deliver on that promise, while suppressing the urge to compare a fraudster’s emotions to a Fourth of July fireworks show—we will save that one for another day.

The responsibility for finding fraud is a highly debated topic and one I enjoy discussing with different groups because most individuals have a lot of passion and emotions wrapped up in their perspectives and opinions. I can’t believe that I haven’t written about this topic before, and it’s funny that it took a swarm of bees to inspire me to do so. 

I have struggled to pluck a story from my past that would help me introduce this series about red flags – the warning signs of fraud. I sought to find a story of warning where I failed to heed the warning and learned a valuable life lesson that warnings are important. I asked my older daughter for ideas, and she reminded me of a time when I took her and her sister hiking. I didn’t see how the story tied into my request, but after she explained, I understood.

With this week’s post, I hope to lighten the mood a bit, but I don’t want you to think that I take fraud lightly. If you know me, I like to tell jokes to make people laugh. However, I am sometimes ineffective because I come up with funny things in my head, but when I say them out loud, they come out as corny. 

I finished my first ultramarathon. It was an amazing adventure. The journey began by setting a goal at the end of last year and ended when I crossed the finish line on Saturday. I really enjoyed the race. It was wet, muddy, and slippery, but I find it very hard to complain when I only ran 31 miles. There were others running 50 or 100 miles. They were just getting warmed up when I was finishing. I say “warmed up,” but it was about 55 degrees when I finished (some 10 degrees cooler than when we started).