The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners spotlighted people who have been exposing financial fraud at companies and governments worldwide during its Global Fraud Conference, including signs of financial shenanigans that accountants and auditors should be watching.
The conference, which the ACFE hosted last week in Boston, included sessions and presentations devoted to detecting and deterring the latest schemes and technology used by fraudsters such as deepfakes and artificial intelligence.
The ACFE presented awards to a number of honorees who have been combating fraud, including Dato' Seri Wan Suraya Wan Mohd Radzi, who received the 2026 Cressey Award for lifetime achievement in fraud prevention and detection. She described her career and innovative approaches to auditing and public transparency as the Auditor General of Malaysia. One of her biggest achievements was an amendment to the country's Audit Act, which broadened the audit mandate in Malaysia and introduced the "Follow the Public Money" approach, empowering the Auditor General to trace and account for the use of public money in Malaysia wherever it flows. She also championed the introduction of the Auditor General's Dashboard, a digital monitoring tool accessible to the public, which supports the country's National Anti-Corruption Strategy.
Sentinel Award recipient Noelle Webb shared her story of how she used her experience as a whistleblower to become an advocate and support others who come forward to expose fraud and corruption. She helped uncover financial wrongdoing at the pharmaceutical company where she worked, but the experience led to isolation and anguish. Eventually with the help of a service dog, she found comfort and founded her own dog-training organization, Leash of Courage. She brought her own service dog onstage with her during a fireside chat and to a later book signing.
The Guardian Award went to Drew Sullivan and Paul Radu, co-founders of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, whose investigative work has exposed corruption, organized crime and financial fraud across international borders. They described how their organization emerged 19 years ago after they interviewed a human trafficker in a bar while he was on "vacation" from a prison sentence he was supposed to be serving in Bosnia Herzegovina.
"This is a global business — corruption and crime — and they're really good at it, and they have networks," said Sullivan. "Those networks, now empowered by London lawyers and enablers around the world, are some of the most powerful business and financial structures on earth, doing trillions of dollars worth of business every single year, and that money flows into an alternative financial economy that's huge. We realized this was a network. We needed a network to fight it, and so we created OCCRP. And our mission is to really give journalists that environment where they can do collaborative work with the best research, security, data work, legal protection, all the types of things that people need to do, and that's really what we think is the future."
Today, their organization has a network of more than 150 journalists across 30 countries and has uncovered money laundering schemes in Russia and Central Asia, as well as the hidden wealth of politicians and business leaders being channeled through the Swiss banking system.
"We were interviewing and meeting all sorts of criminals all over Central and Eastern Europe to understand how they work, how they think, why they were doing what they were doing," said Radu. "Those were always the most fascinating encounters with these kinds of people. They were evil, and they found reasoning for everything that they do. They could justify whatever crime they were involved with."
During a later session, a pair of inspectors general with the federal government gave a presentation on their experiences with grant fraud investigation cases.
"Grant fraud is lying, stealing or cheating, or any combination, whether a standalone lie or a family of lies, cheating attempts or schemes, stolen information, goods or money," said Jonelle Soeffing, an operations officer with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Inspector General. "Focus on where any wrongful act by the grantee took place or the recipients."
She noted that a full evaluation of all the allegations is necessary to determine if fraud exists.
"Agencies like my own are great at harnessing fraud patterns and schemes, and leveraging data analytics to identify anomalies, outliers or compromised streams of grant funding," she added. "A great outcome for this conference will hopefully be that you'll all begin to look at matters with a different lens, one that recognizes potential issues that might be readily apparent or hidden by creative layers placed by fraudsters. Once allegations are in your hands, and it's time to review the complaint information for proper next steps, you'll first need to deconflict to determine if the matter is new or potentially connected to another active or ongoing matter within your organization or within another agency. You'll need to verify a nexus to your organization, whether that's by funding or another type of tie."
When reviewing all involved grant fraud allegations, it's important for investigators to remember that grantees often have multiple grants and contracts, often with different agencies, and she suggested searching in
"Partnerships, as we all know, help to drive investigations forward," said Soeffing. "Based on where the investigations occur or the location of the subject, you'll need to determine jurisdiction, essentially where to send the complaint information if it's not already in the best hands. After the best venue is identified, it's helpful to access the people that you need to help to develop the appropriate resolutions, depending on the type of fraud that's involved with the allegations, so you have options within your federal, state or local prosecutors, or this could be sharing information with your head agency to assure compliance is met with the grant conditions.
"Once some of these initial steps are taken, it will be time to analyze allegations to assess what evidence needs to be gathered, and the places to do the evidence gathering," she added. "It's important to take a robust approach when evaluating placement of a complaint, and options to refer to federal or state prosecutors, auditors within your agency for administrative action, or to another OIG. This will ensure wide awareness and best handling of the complaint. Even if, in the end, the decision is made to close a matter without further action, sometimes the allegations are not fully substantiated, and we have no other choice. But there will at least be a record of the complaint, and in the end, you'll know that you've given the matter, the complaint, the widest level of awareness and handling."
Most federal grantees are required to spend down the funds within three days of when they are drawn, except under special circumstances.
"If you are drawing down money and just keeping it in the bank or spending it on other things, that can be a problem," said Pamela Van Dort, associate inspector general for infrastructure and grant oversight at the U.S. Department of the Interior's Office of Inspector General.
"A key piece of information to understand in conducting grant fraud investigations is the typical flow of money," she added. "A lot of the money, 80% of that trillion dollars I mentioned, generally goes to state and regional governments, who then typically give the money to other entities to actually carry out the award."
She noted that the fraud often occurs at the lower levels of the chain.
"There are people that are getting a benefit from these subcontractors and contractors at the end of the day," said Van Dort. "Where is the money actually being spent, or in the case of fraud, misspent? It's typically at the subrecipient layers. Our grantee is just passing through the money. Oftentimes in particular states, they're passing it through to other people, and the fraud is at that lower level. It's important to know that when you're going in to see where and how the money goes."
