The Art of Radical Sharing

Marina Walker Guevara opened her keynote session at the 36th Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference by connecting her work as an investigative journalist to the work that fraud examiners do every day. 

“There is so much in common between your profession and my profession. Similar challenges, similar methodologies and a similar level of obsessive personality of which we are very proud.” 

Walker Guevara, executive director of the Pulitzer Center, talked to audiences about her work as a reporter, investigating public interest stories by leveraging data and holding powerful people to account. She’s the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners’ (ACFE) Guardian Award recipient, an honor bestowed on a journalist whose work has exposed fraud and white-collar crime. More than nine years ago, as deputy director for nonprofit news organization The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), Walker Guevara brought together and managed hundreds of journalists across the globe who collaborated for more than a year to investigate the leaked data files known as the Panama Papers. The massive collaboration exposed the secret financial world of the wealthiest 1%, led to the resignations of some politicians and helped law enforcement track and trace fraudsters, drug dealers and arms traffickers. In 2017, Walker Guevara and her cohorts won the Pulitzer Prize for their collaborative efforts on the Panama Papers investigation. 

Along with her keynote speech, Walker Guevara also participated in an interview with Mandy Moody, CFE, the ACFE’s vice president of communications.    

Throughout her keynote, Walker Guevara discussed the importance of professional collaborations on big, expansive investigations and how those collaborations can lead to accomplishing seemingly impossible things.   

“Collaboration has been a cornerstone of my career. It has allowed me to do stories that, in the newsroom, we’d say, ‘That’s impossible. That’s never going to happen.’”

But as she demonstrated, when a group of professionals come together and lend their expertise and ingenuity to a seemingly impossible task, anything is possible. 

Walker Guevara demonstrated how collaboration can make things possible when she displayed an image of a black hole, something that had been previously impossible to photograph until a group of 200 scientists used their individual telescopes as part of a network to take the first photograph of a black hole — something that would’ve previously required the a telescope the size of Earth.  

“And when I think about this example, I just think about journalism and how that ingenuity and that collaboration has allowed us to really go beyond our limitations, explore new frontiers and do the stories of public interest that the world really needs, and that’s probably similar in your profession [fraud examination] right now.” 

But as Walker Guevara noted, this type of collaboration wasn’t always characteristic of journalism. An image of a wolf appeared on the screen. 

“This is the lone wolf. This is us. This is the journalist; it’s part of our DNA. We are set to be lone wolves,” she told attendees. “We have our documents. We have our data. We hold a lot of that. We go to our caves and investigate and obsess and dig deep. And then we’d come out with our big scoop that hopefully changes something. For many years, decades and centuries, we worked this way. And the lone wolves are responsible for some of our most world-changing journalism — except that with the stories we started to face, the model of the lone wolf wasn’t working anymore.”  

“Whether we’re investigating financial flows, whether we’re investigating political campaigns, or whether we're investigating environmental degradation, something had to change. We weren't making a dent.”  

Walker Guevara pointed to others who collaborate to accomplish big things. Law enforcement agencies work together to catch criminals. The criminals have their networks to carry out their misdeeds. “And journalists are working in isolation, chipping away at the same stories; that didn’t make any sense,” she told attendees. “We need a network to fight a network.” 

Trust in Radical Sharing  

Walker Guevara refers to journalist collaborations as “radical sharing.”  

“We started to create trust with one another. We convinced our bosses and our business owners, the owners of media, that this way of working, this radical [sharing], is the model that made sense.”

An early example of this type of radical sharing came in 2014 when the pro-Russian president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, was ousted from the country amid protests and accusations of corruption. But before fleeing, he threw documents into a lagoon, Walker Guevara told attendees. Journalists fished the documents out of the lagoon, reconstructed and digitized them.  

“They reported these stories that the president thought he could bury by destroying documents,” said Walker Guevara. “It’s an early example of the power of journalism when it thinks in a different way, when it goes beyond the scope and beyond the individual reward.” 

According to Walker Guevara, when journalists share work, they’re not only sharing data and documents, but they’re also bringing together people with different skill sets who can contribute something different according to the story they’re working on. It’s all about sharing resources.  

Sharing skills and resources becomes especially important when the subject of the story is corruption. “Local expertise is really important,” she explained to attendees. “Corruption is always local first, right?” It means that there are journalists on the ground who are already familiar with the people involved.  

When journalists share work, Walker Guevara explained, they can also distribute the risks that often come with reporting stories that involve powerful people and corruption.  

An important aspect of radical sharing of documents and data is building the technical infrastructure that enables investigating, analyzing and sharing information. “If we don’t have a technical infrastructure, we will succumb.” 

Data Leaks 

All this discussion of radical sharing and technological-infrastructure building leads up to big stories: the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers leaks. 

The story of how the Panama Papers leak, and later, the Paradise Papers leak, became an international sensation is well-known to many all over the world by now. In 2015, Bastian Obermayer, a journalist for German daily news publication, Süddeutsche Zeitung, received an electronic file from an anonymous source known only as “John Doe.” Those files, according to John Doe, were internal documents from an obscure law firm based in Panama, called Mossack Fonseca. What Mossack Fonseca lacked in name recognition it made up for in being a prolific provider of offshore financial services to the world’s rich and famous. The little-known law firm would soon enough become notorious. 

Obermayer, along with his colleague, Frederik Obermaier, would turn to the ICIJ for help. As Obermayer told Fraud Magazine in a 2019 interview, there weren’t many German stories in all those documents, but there were plenty for an international audience. And the two German reporters didn’t speak the languages many of the documents were written in. Walker Guevara marshaled the global reporter reserves to assist the German journalists in the investigation. More than 370 reporters hailing from nearly 80 countries across six continents, representing 100 news organizations, were involved in the year-long Panama Papers excavation. 

“This investigation was about a worldwide system of inequity and crime.”

Walker Guevara says the most important impact of the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers leaks were the connections that regular people were able to make to the stories. “I think that regular citizens were able to connect to, and finally understand, why the fact that someone has a [an offshore] structure in a tax haven, means that they’re not paying taxes. This actually has an impact on their life.” 

In closing her session, Walker Guevara returned to the black hole scientists who collaborated to make the impossible possible and addressed fraud examiners directly.   

“You are the black hole scientists. You are the ones reaching for the impossible and trying to see what others are telling you is un-seeable,” she said. “Let's have a deeper conversation about the role that investigations can play in rebuilding our democratic society and how we might create a more equitable society, because that's what you are working for.”