Key insights from the ACFE Global Fraud Conference 2018

FRA's Jenny Bi, Jordan Heier, Pranali Shetty and Ambrose Amin attended the ACFE Global Fraud 2018 Conference in June.

The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners is the world's largest anti-fraud organization and provider of anti-fraud training and education. The conference hosted experts in the anti-fraud field who addressed the latest trends and issues.

Key insights from the conference include:

Trends for the industry:

• Emerging technologies to play an important role in the industry: block chain, AI, machine learning
• Data is becoming an important commodity: monitoring and mining data could help with effective risk management and controls
• Collaboration is key to success: collaboration among different teams, functions, jurisdictions leads to success on fraud investigation

Data analytics:

• Data can be leveraged for:
• Fraud monitoring and detection
• Fraud investigations
• Fraud analytics and reporting
• Enhancing existing fraud tools
• There are many tools on the market to help integrate data science and machine learning in forensic analytics; no one tool can solve all the problems and challenges and a suite of tools and problem solving skills are required.

Trends for FCPA enforcement:

• Multi-jurisdiction: will see more countries with similar enforcement and cross-jurisdiction collaboration
• Focusing on individuals instead of only going after corporations
• Focusing on books and records issues
• Recurring enforcement actions
• DOJ & SEC pushing boundaries of the definition of "foreign official"

Trends for Shell companies:

• Shell companies can be found in nearly every type of business transaction and are on the rise with risks appear repetitively in every in industry and country. They help facilitate crimes and the losses are substantial with even larger fines in cases where they are identified as being used.
• Increased risks are direct results of several converging and compounding effects that are increasing the ease of shell company usage, while at the same time decreasing the probability of detection.

New Revenue Recognition Standards:

• ASC 606 is possibly the most significant change in financial reporting in a generation. The response from companies will require modification to data analytics, internal audit and investigation procedures. There will be fraud risks associated with ASC 606. Subsequently, this can lead to new opportunities for work for audit and forensic accounting firms.