ACFE Regent Chair Video: Bethmara Kessler, CFE

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ACFE Regent Chair Video: Bethmara Kessler, CFE

"One of the hardest things to learn as a leader is to recognize that there are lessons you haven't learned yet and that there are places where you can do better. We must do better. And we must continue to listen, learn and grow,” said Bethmara Kessler, CFE.

Kessler, the Chair of the ACFE Board of Regents, spoke to attendees at the 31st Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference on Monday morning and talked about the role of the Regents.

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Keynote Speaker Video: Howard Wilkinson

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Keynote Speaker Video: Howard Wilkinson

"You should never really have heard of me,” Howard Wilkinson, the Danske Bank whistleblower told attendees at the 31st Annual ACFE Global Conference on Monday.

“Something bad had happened in the branch. We all know bad things happen. A whistleblower reported it, internal audit investigated it, reported it to top management. And top management had taken the necessary action, made the necessary reports and done what needed to be done. You would have never heard of me. It didn't happen like that."

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Keynote Speaker Video: Jules Kroll

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Keynote Speaker Video: Jules Kroll

“All along the way, hundreds of people who worked for us all over the world had that CFE designation. And it was the CFE team, individuals, groups, that provided the bulk of the analytical work, the accounting analysis and the other analysis dealing with fraud,” said Jules Kroll, founder of K2 Intelligence.

Kroll spoke to attendees at the 31st Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference on Monday morning and took them through the story of how he began J. Kroll Associates in 1972 (later Kroll Inc.), and how he helped shape corporate forensic investigations as we now know them.

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Whistleblowers Are Better Protected, but Still Face Retaliation

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Whistleblowers Are Better Protected, but Still Face Retaliation

Is this a good time to be a corporate whistleblower? Probably, according to a panel of watchdog experts, with some caveats.

The ACFE’s 2020 Report to the Nations shows that tips remain the most common way for fraud to be detected, which accounted for 43% of the survey respondents’ cases. However, panelist Stephen Kohn, a longtime counsel to whistleblowers, said employees should think twice before they report problems internally.

“My message to members is, don't fall on your sword,” said Kohn, chairman of the board of the National Whistleblower Center and partner, Kohn, Kohn & Colapinto LLP. “If you raise a concern, if you issue an audit report, if you make an internal complaint — and you get resistance from the company — don't set your hair on fire,” he said.

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‘Accidental Whistleblower' Decries Corporate Irresponsibility

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‘Accidental Whistleblower' Decries Corporate Irresponsibility

Howard Wilkinson, the recipient of the 2020 ACFE Cliff Robertson Sentinel Award, admits that he’s a bit of an accidental whistleblower. And if his employer had been more responsible, he wouldn’t have been a whistleblower at all.

“Back in summer 2012, I had to help someone in the Estonian branch of Danske Bank where I was working [as a trader] get some financial information on a client,” Wilkinson said, during the lunch general session. “The client was a British limited liability partnership (LLP), so I went to Companies House, which is the U.K.’s official government agency that collects all the company information and annual financial statements,” he said. “I paid one pound, and I downloaded this company's financial statements.”

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How Do You Find Someone Who Doesn’t Want to be Found?

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How Do You Find Someone Who Doesn’t Want to be Found?

Identity is a subject that has fascinated humans for ages. Who am I? Who are you? While no one can easily answer these philosophical quandaries, identity is an important part of many fraud investigations — especially when someone is trying to hide it.

In his virtual session “The John Smith Problem: Forensic Identity Resolution in Global Investigations,” at the 31st Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference, Robert Sinex, CFE, walked attendees through some of the ways they could find identities and use them to further investigations. Sinex, who is a solutions engineer at Dun & Bradstreet, explained that identity is made up of not only attributes, like a name and telephone number, but also behavior, like hobbies and routines.

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