The Future of Fraud Investigations in Canada

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The Future of Fraud Investigations in Canada

How do you get a room full of attorneys, accountants and auditors to definitively agree on something? As Henry Tso illustrated at the 2019 ACFE Fraud Conference Canada in Montreal, you ask them if they have ever been a victim of a fraud attempt. Tso, a former RCMP superintendent and officer in charge, asked more than 340 attendees to raise their hands if they had received a call from someone pretending to work for the Canadian Revenue Agency (CRA) attempting to gain personal information. “I received a call two days ago from the CRA,” he said. “How many people received that call?” A flurry of hands went up without hesitation.

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5 Ways to Promote Honesty in Interviews

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5 Ways to Promote Honesty in Interviews

What lie do you think a fraudster is on by the time you, the fraud examiner, is introduced to him or her? The first? The second? The hundredth? The truth is, no pun intended, by the time you are sitting across the table from them, they have most likely been lying to their friends, family and coworkers for a good amount of time. Unfortunately, for those who have been committing crimes, practice does not make perfect and a fraud examiner has a wealth of tools available to spot signs of deception.

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What Fraud Examiners Should Know About the Anti-Corruption Landscape in Mexico

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What Fraud Examiners Should Know About the Anti-Corruption Landscape in Mexico

At the 2019 Houston ACFE Fraud Conference, Fernando Cevallos, CFE, and his co-presenter Javier López de Obeso explained the current anti-corruption environment in Mexico. They discussed what fraud examiners should know in order to conduct effective investigations while also avoiding putting themselves in dangerous, potentially life-threatening situations.

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Former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara to Keynote at 2019 ACFE Fraud Risk Management Summit

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Former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara to Keynote at 2019 ACFE Fraud Risk Management Summit

One of the most important objectives of any fraud examination is to find the truth. As simple as this may sound, there are a million different obstacles that can prevent fraud examiners from achieving this goal. “One's understanding of the truth — whether that's the correctness of a fact or the guilt of a person — should never be unalterable,” says Preet Bharara in his New York Times best-seller Doing Justice: A Prosecutor’s Thoughts on Crime, Punishment, and the Rule of Law. Bharara will speak to anti-fraud executives at the 2019 ACFE Fraud Risk Management Summit, to be held on October 17 in New York, New York.

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Identifying Conflicts of Interest From the Outside-In

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Identifying Conflicts of Interest From the Outside-In

Imagine that a large multinational company in China is suspected of engaging in collusive activity between salespeople and distributors, and the allegations involve potentially thousands of entities and millions of transactions. The company needs a way to rapidly identify potential trouble spots where they can launch a detailed investigation.

According to Allanna Rigby, director of Control Risks Group, conflicts of interest, like the case described above, are quite hard to detect. At the 2019 ACFE Fraud Conference Asia-Pacific, she told attendees that cultural nuances make conflict-of-interest investigations even more difficult.

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Navigating Stormy Seas: How Can You Anticipate the Unexpected in Investigations?

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Navigating Stormy Seas: How Can You Anticipate the Unexpected in Investigations?

Investigations are pivotal to fraud examination. Though fraud examiners prepare as much as they can before launching an investigation, CFEs understand that things are unlikely to go exactly as planned — new evidence arises and interviews yield surprising discoveries. CFEs also often must navigate difficult personalities, change their expectations for the scope of work, deal with organization restructuring and more that they cannot readily anticipate.

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"Billion-Dollar Whale" Author Recounts the Collapse of 1MDB

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"Billion-Dollar Whale" Author Recounts the Collapse of 1MDB

Best-selling author Tom Wright’s address at the 2019 ACFE Fraud Conference Asia-Pacific began and ended with one central figure in the 1MDB corruption scandal: Paris Hilton. I kid. But, Hilton’s name did come up several times while Wright recounted the events that led to the ousting of Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak and the exposure of a billion-dollar corruption scheme known as 1MDB.

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