• Digging Into the Divorce Lifestyle Analysis

    In an ordinary lifestyle analysis, the divorce financial analyst extracts all of the transactions from bank, brokerage and credit card statements, categorizes them and calculates totals for each category for the period under analysis. This is an important exercise to […]

  • How to Develop a Fraud Investigation Policy

    An investigative policy is an important tool to help manage the process of initiating a corporate fraud investigation. Doing so will help bring uniformity to the evaluation of fraud allegations, and it will help guide management through the decision making […]

  • Impact of Collusion and Power on Financial Statement Fraud

    Employees in positions of power have greater opportunities to commit and conceal financial statement fraud. Tracy explains how and why this is the case in the video below.

  • Formats for Financial Data in Fraud Investigations

    How should your accounting records be provided to your forensic accountant? Tracy talks about how she wants to receive the general ledger and related data. (Hint: Digital is preferred over paper.)

  • Financial Investigations With High Volumes of Data

    Cases with high volumes of bank data, such as money laundering, high net worth divorce, securities fraud, Ponzi schemes, tax fraud, and white collar crime, present special challenges for forensic accountants. High volumes of financial data can be overwhelming. How […]

  • Hidden Assets in Divorce Cases

    Hidden assets can impact both the property division and the award of support payments. Assets hidden by one spouse deprive the other spouse of a share of them. If the hidden assets include income-producing assets such as a business venture […]

  • Finding Hidden Income and Assets During Divorce

    Divorce and child support cases often are highlighted by disputes over money. One party may be accused of artificially depressing earnings, hiding assets or manipulating the finances to lower the financial obligation to another party. Understanding the complete picture of […]

  • Public Records in Financial Investigations

    The internet is an important source of information in financial investigations. It has become so important, that I wonder what I ever did without access to all of this information! Even though my work is focused on digging into the […]

  • Financial Statement Fraud at Public Companies

    How prevalent is financial statement fraud in public companies? In this video, Tracy Coenen talks about the most recent COSO report on fraudulent financial reporting at U.S. public companies. The most common financial statement fraud that companies engaged in was […]

  • Staying Independent in Fraud Investigations

    I would like to think that most companies are committed to doing business honestly. They try to do the right thing, and when a problem is found, they try to correct it quickly. Even when a scandal is looming, I […]