Igniting anti-fraud research via ACFE Foundation

On March 14, the Institute of Fraud Prevention (IFP) merged with the ACFE Foundation, which expanded the Foundation’s mission beyond college scholarships to cutting-edge, anti-fraud research that’s accessible to all CFEs. The IFP will now be known as the ACFE Research Institute. ACFE members and other anti-fraud professionals are the beneficiaries.

Why should you keep up with new anti-fraud research? Perhaps you’re thinking, “I use tried-and-true fraud examination principles every day in my cases. New research doesn’t really affect me. I’ll leave all that to the academics.”

But the insights that researchers discover now could give you that competitive differentiator when your organization is deciding who to assign to a prime project, help you find that missing link in your current investigation or spark new thinking into your uses of technology.

For example, a team of researchers¹ using data from past editions of the ACFE Report to the Nations surveys examined the characteristics of fraud cases in which management overrode internal controls. They found several distinctions between management overrides and other frauds in which victim organizations simply lacked internal controls.

Among the implications of this study is that organizations with strong anti-fraud environments might be more at risk of management override frauds. Boards, auditors and management at these organizations need to carefully focus on the risk of control overrides and look at specific capabilities (skill sets, position, coercion skills, etc.) of those in key management positions.

Now that’s information you can use. And there’s a lot more where that came from.