ACFE Foundation’s Ritchie-Jennings Memorial Scholarship awards students $56,000 in funds for 2022-2023 term

The ACFE Foundation’s Ritchie-Jennings Memorial Scholarship has awarded $56,000 in funds to 25 university students from across the U.S., Canada, Nigeria and South Korea for the 2022-2023 academic year. The students, who demonstrated achievement in a field related to the anti-fraud profession, received amounts ranging from $1,000 to $10,000 — paid directly to their schools.

“We had 103 applications this year from around the world. The winners were from schools of all sizes and were interested in a wide variety of subjects from accounting to cybercrimes to education. I’m pleased to see so many young people having an interest in fraud examination and promoting this discipline into the future,” says ACFE Foundation Chairman Charles Washington, CFE. Washington is the senior director of global fraud and asset protection at Pfizer.

Ritchie-Jennings Memorial Scholarship funds are awarded to students pursuing a career in the anti-fraud field who have a declared major in either accounting, business administration, finance or criminal justice each year. The foundation also provides scholarship winners with a full year of ACFE membership.

The scholarship is named after Larry Jennings, CFE, and Tracy Ritchie, CFE. They were among five employees of the Houston, Texas-based Union Texas Petroleum Inc. who died in a terrorist attack in Karachi, Pakistan, in 1997.

Current students who are interested in applying for the 2023-2024 academic year scholarship must have a declared major or minor in accounting, business administration, finance or criminal justice and must be enrolled full time at an accredited, four-year college or university through the 2023-2024 school year.

The scholarship is open to both undergraduate and graduate students. According to the foundation, undergraduates must be enrolled in nine semester hours per term and be in the second half of their sophomore year when they apply. Graduate students must be enrolled in six semester hours per term.

The application period for the 2023-2024 academic year opens on Sept. 15, 2022, and ends Feb. 6, 2023. The foundation will announce the winners in April 2023 and distribute the awards in May 2023. The foundation selects scholarship winners based on their completed applications, fraud-related interests and goals, academic transcripts and recommendation forms. Students are ineligible for scholarship funds if they’ve won in the past. For more information about the scholarship and how to apply, visit ACFE.com/scholarship.