All companies are at risk for financial fraud. In fact, most companies lose 5% of revenue to fraud, according to the 2014 ACFE Report to the Nation on Occupational Fraud and Abuse. What's a company to do? Many develop anti-fraud programs--but with mixed results. This brief book, How to Uncover Corporate Fraud, offers a better way. As author and antifraud expert Alexis Bell shows, the ultimate goal of an effective anti-fraud program is to mitigate risk to the organization due to fraud through a combination of preventative, detective, and deterrent controls. Bell helps you understand and use those controls to identify fraud and catch it before it damages a company seriously.
In particular, she shows how ratio analysis, performed on specific financial relationships to better highlight the red flags, is a prime means to avoid both losing money and becoming a victim of fraudulent financial reporting. These "ratio red flags" provide indicators that are meaningful at varying levels. Retailers, for example, will learn to detect fraud at both a store level, chain level, and companywide level.
Bell's fraud analysis approach: Incorporates the balance sheet and income statement, along with other financial documents, for a complete analysis Provides indicators of fraud currently occurring for broad categories of criminal activity as well as specific fraud schemes Spotlights indicators that could later cause reporting problems without interventionIncludes an initial assessment that can then transition into a continuous monitoring process as part of an ongoing anti-fraud programWhether you are a forensic accountant unsure where to start an investigation, an internal auditor interested in due diligence for fraud, an analyst charged with identifying aggressive accounting tactics, or an external consultant interested in adding value for your clients, How to Uncover Corporate Fraud will give you an effective tool for your anti-fraud process--and save you a lot of stress and heartache down the road.
About the Author: Alexis Bell is a pioneer in the international antifraud industry. She is energized by solving complex problems. She has a natural ability to break intricate matters down into their base parts in order to create a structure and build a framework for the solution. She is a published author (3 books) with an Ivy League education (undergrad at Cornell University and fellowship at Dartmouth). She has international experience as a forensic accountant leading complex corporate fraud investigations (up to 300M Euros) specializing in insider threats. She has conducted research in data analysis particularly around financial statement analysis and transaction level data. Alexis designed and implemented the Global Anitifraud Program from the ground up for a public company ($19B annual revenue, 165,000 employees). The program addressed areas of governance, fraud risk assessment, fraud awareness training, investigations and continuous monitoring. Most recently, she pioneered the first Global Antifraud Program in the microfinance industry (nonprofit) in 22 post/active conflict developing countries in the Greater Middle East, Eurasia, Latin America, and Africa. She is active in the antifraud community as a current member and former Board President of the Charlotte Chapter Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, a member of the U.S. FBI InfraGard task force, and a former member of the U.S. Secret Service Electronic Crimes Task Force in Charlotte, NC. In addition, she lectures at conferences and provides specialized training both domestically and internationally. Alexis spearheaded and chaired internal diversity programs addressing employee education and community outreach regarding both women's and Native American initiatives. She has been an active member serving on internal diversity and inclusion boards as well as external nonprofit boards supporting both antifraud and the arts.
