Q&A

Jim Ratley and ACFE: Going Broad on Fraud

Five years post-Enron, corporate fraud and white-collar crime continue to make headlines. Jim Ratley of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners checks in to talk about corporate fraud and effective investigations.

By Scott Berinato

someone to admit they hate their mother. A corporate security person has three hours to get someone

to admit they killed their mother. It's a big difference, and I'll match the trained fraud interviewer

against any psychologist you want. If they're skilled, if they're experienced, the fraud investigator

knows how to play somebody like that. If someone comes up and tells me, "They owed me that money,"

I'll fall right in line. I'll say, "Tell me about that."

What are some other tips for successful interviews?

First off, there are no lucky interviews. The good interviewers I know never walk into an interview

without as much preparation as is available. They know the case backwards and forwards. They know

the documents backwards and forwards. That way, when you come up to me and make a statement that

might not be factual, I can confront you with it. I might confront you now or 30 minutes from now, and

I have to know how to confront you. If I just say, "You lied to me," well, now I've challenged you and

that might not work. Instead, I might throw in some tie-down or tag questions to make you lie to me:

"Now you'd never do anything like that wouldja?" Later on, "Let me show you this document here." And

that way I've not challenged you. I make it easy for you to tell me what you've done. I'm not judgmental.

I impress you with my knowledge of the incident. There is an art to the interview. People get better

during their careers. I've never met the best interviewer in the world because that person hasn't been

invented yet. The good ones keep getting better. If I were a corporate executive in charge of security,

with a limited training budget, the one thing I would make sure everyone on my staff were trained to do

is interview and do admission-seeking interviews. That's the backbone to everything we do.

Dealing with suspects is one thing. What about clients? Don't fraud victims sometimes resist admitting

they've been duped?

It's one of the major obstacles we run into. And here's why: We've all worked around people we don't

like. And television trains us that law breakers, fraud perpetrators, are going to be people we don't like.

In reality, when we get to work, it's the person we go to church with, the person that last November we

went to dinner with, that we called a friend. And it's so hard for us to realize that person will cross the

line. Generally speaking when I go into an investigation, and they say it could be anyone except Joe

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