Becoming fraud preventers

   From the President and CEO 

Fraud fighting isn’t for the faint of heart. You didn’t get into this profession because you thought your days would be free of conflicts and dead ends. Regardless, we stick with it because we know we’re really making a difference. Preet Bharara, like you, enjoys catching the bad guys. However, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York would much rather motivate corporate employees and future (and present) fraud examiners to be gutsy, ethical fraud preventers.  

“For whatever reason — a lack of courage or a fear for their own jobs or a worry about being ostracized — many do not report fraud when they see it. They don’t speak up when they see something fishy going on. And that’s the central problem for anybody who cares about fighting fraud,” Bharara says in the interview cover article. Organizations then can’t prevent young frauds from taking root, he says.  

“In almost every instance of a massive fraud, you see detailed in the pages of the financial press that there were many, many, many people who were not part of the fraud necessarily but in some way enabled it by not sounding the alarm when there was an opportunity to do so,” Bharara says. 

Bharara knows what’s talking about. He’s probably most famous for high-profile Wall Street insider-trading cases, but he’s tackled scores of other fraud, terrorism, cyber crime and public corruption cases. He’ll share his stories and philosophy at the 24th Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference, June 23-28 at the ARIA Resort & Casino in Las Vegas.