April 19, 2007 Seminar
A Trio of Seminars on Detecting Fraud, Automating Internal Audit Departments, and Automating Your Anti-Fraud Procedures
Presented by Rich Lanza, CPA/CITP, CFE, PMP – President – Cash Recovery Partners, LLC
Morning Session: Tools and Techniques for Combating Project Risk & Fraud
Fraud affects all organizations and company projects are at just as much risk of error and fraud as any other company activity. This session will provide the following benefits:
- Define project risk and its relevance to corporate governance and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.
- Describe key project vulnerabilities with associated safeguards (such as bids, billings, payroll, etc.).
- Present to project managers and auditors a roadmap to limiting risk within their projects.
- Provide an array of tools that can be used to identify red flags.
- Outline data analysis tests that can be executed on company databases to detect fraud symptoms that relate to key project vulnerabilities. Note: This section begins discussing some of the automated fraud routines that will be explored in more detail during the afternoon session since some techniques provide multiple benefits.
- Understand how project portfolio management, and associated software tools, can help guard the project portfolio.
- Provide a comprehensive business case written to justify establishment of a Project Management Office and/or a Project Risk
- Initiative.
Lunch Session: Automating Your Internal Audit Department
This unique session will explore the entire landscape of audit software tools including data analysis tools, continuous controls monitoring, SOX documentation platforms, research/benchmarking data, and others. Based on a 1,000-hour research project of over 160 audit software vendors and their respective users, this presentation will highlight:
- Top trends impacting the audit software market.
- How organizations are taking the automated plunge, making efficiency gains, improving audit findings, and simply “doing more with less”.
- The top reasons why audit software is not implemented effectively.
- The top ways to reverse the negative experiences with automated tools and start using them to make our day easier and save the organization significant dollars.
- How to adopt a data analysis methodology.
- A high-level look at analytical techniques including queries vs data mining, time trending, pivot table analysis, stratification, and key words.
- An overview of data analysis routines available from public websites.
- A word about automated audit support tools such as enterprise risk management, audit workpapers, and SOX automation available to help organizations manage the volumes of data in support of their control environment.
Afternoon Session: Automating Your Fraud Detection
To combat fraud, companies are implementing anti-fraud programs and controls yet any effective program needs to have automated procedures that sift through organizational data. Auditors also need such automated routines as company data becomes more and more digitized. Through a collection of practical case studies in the areas of general ledger, accounts payable, accounts receivable, payroll, and inventory, an automated fraud detection methodology will be presented that:
- Automates each procedure in an anti-fraud program and controls.
- Helps identify the most risky frauds for investment of automated routines.
- Aligns to these frauds precise and close proximity reports to maximize findings.
- Assigns the appropriate software to the task at hand, including a detailed look at data analysis techniques including financial statement analysis, data mining, spreadsheet audit tools, and external benchmarking.
- Uses a combination of statistical, data visualization, and filtering tools.
- Sets a priority model for sorting the results for actual review and testing.
Rich is an author of over 13 publications including the 2007 Buyer’s Guide to Audit, Anti-Fraud, and Assurance Software, the IIA’s Proactively Detecting Fraud Using Computer Audit Reports, and Essential Project Investment Governance and Reporting: Techniques for Preventing Project Fraud and Ensuring Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance. He is a leading authority on audit software with more published works on the topic than anyone else, which includes his free website AuditSoftware.Net and his regular column in the ACFE’s Fraud Magazine. AuditSoftware.Net is ranked by Google as the #1 website for audit software. More importantly, Rich practically uses audit software daily, as he has for the past 15 years, saving clients millions of dollars annually. He focuses his data analysis work in the areas of accounts payable recovery, fraud detection, and in the improvement of financial processes. He has authored training courses on ACL, IDEA, Access, ActiveData, and Excel.
Key Seminar Bonus: All attendees to the seminar will receive a FREE copy of Essential Project Investment Governance and Reporting: Techniques for Preventing Project Fraud and Ensuring Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance ($60 value). This is an excellent guidebook with lots of detailed information regarding the identification of key project vulnerabilities and associated safeguards. Attendees will also receive a FREE copy of the 2007 Buyer’s Guide to Audit, Anti-Fraud, and Assurance Software ($100 value) which provides the first comprehensive look at this emerging market, covering more than 160 vendors and containing material literally available nowhere else. Roughly one-half of the Guide’s pages is made up of essays and articles from the three coauthors on how to successfully implement a computer-aided audit environment, what tools to implement first, how to negotiate with vendors, what the real long-term benefits of new software are likely to be, who needs training, what sort of schedule is realistic, and how to avoid winding up with a lot costly shelfware! The remainder of the book consists of in-depth coverage of each vendor, including their history, unique features of their products, and support for user groups, contact information, and more.
Seminar Details
Seminar sponsored by
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Registration: 8:30-9:00
Class: 9:00 – 4:30
Tysons CPA Center 8201 Greensboro Drive Suite 717 McLean, VA 22102
Attendees will earn 8 CPE credits
IIA Members: $300
Non-Members: $325
Group Discount: $250 each (5 or more attendees from same organization)
NOTE: Cost of seminar includes a FREE copy of both books indicated below. Includes breakfast, lunch, beverages, and free parking RSVP by Thursday, April 12th to Heather Bliss at heather_bliss@freddiemac.com Ph (703) 918-5387 Note: Registration obligates payment; contact Heather if you must cancel
