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Chapter Member Photo: Kari Overson

Annual PNW Chapter Conference 

May 1, 2024

University of Washington-Tacoma Campus


Conference Information

Session 1

8:00 to 8:50

Finding Hidden Assets

Kari Overson, PI, CFE

This presentation will introduce participants to several ways of finding assets that were hidden in anticipation of bankruptcies, divorces, and other litigation. Kari will walk participants through the methods she uses to locate hidden assets and will highlight some recent examples that have made it through the court system.

Learning Objectives:

    • The Fraud Examiner’s Role in finding hidden assets.
    • Common types and sources of information.
    • Use of online resources to locate assets.
    • Conducting property searches.
    • Methods to evaluate financial records to locate assets.

Session 2

9:00 to 9:50

Tale of Two Risk Assessments: Sustainable vs Scary

Katie Robinson, CFE, CAMS, GRCP

For many organizations, it is challenging to begin or maintain a catalog of risks and adverse conditions. They begin with the best intentions to identify a list of weaknesses and threats and the associated control activities, either current or planned, to mitigate them. This practice, otherwise known as a risk assessment, inevitably ends up turning into a checkbox exercise that loses all meaning over time. Risk assessments become overly long and detailed, time-consuming, a chore to maintain, unrelatable, uncontrollable and taxing on resources. Would you love to change the story? This session will help dispel these negatives and provide advice on how to create a risk assessment tool and process that is sustainable, scalable, succinct and significant. We will discuss how to create a risk taxonomy that maps to enterprise risk categories and a process to monitor current risks and catalog emerging ones.

You Will Learn How To:

    • Categorize the existing and emerging risks facing your organization.
    • Create a risk assessment tool and process that relates identified risks to enterprise risk categories.
    • Plan routine analyses to identify necessary control activities to mitigate fraud risks.

Session 3

10:00 to 11:50

Professional Ethics 

Brian Steverson, PhD


The Case Theory Approach (sometimes referred to as the Fraud Theory Approach) is the approach to constructing and conducting a fraud investigation recommended by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners. The ACFE Fraud Examiners Manual details the steps of using the Case Theory Approach, but does not draw attention to ethical issues related to employing that approach. This presentation covers a small set of those ethical issues and provides some suggestions for how to ethically conduct a fraud examination using the Case Theory Approach.

This session counts towards the two (2) required hours of ethics CPE training.

Lunch

11:50 to 1:00

Session 4

1:00 to 1:50

Financial Investigations in High Conflict Divorce

James Peet, PhD, CFE


Usually limited to high asset marriages, forensic accounting in divorce cases mainly revolves around determining asset division. Conducting a financial investigation in a high conflict divorce differs from this in that usually there is the added element of fraud. This presentation will discuss the elements of a high conflict divorce, red flags associated with high conflict divorces, and how to conduct the financial investigation from intake through the court process.

Session 5

2:00 to 2:50

Elder Financial Abuse and Civil Fraud 

Saphronia R. Young, JD & Holly Surface, JD


Elder financial abuse is a devastating event that can destroy lives. While most presentations focus on the criminal aspects, this talk will focus on the civil aspects from a legal standpoint. Two attorneys will discuss what they see as the most common types of elder financial abuse, red flags associated with them, and their expectations from the fraud examiner/financial investigator in helping their civil cases.

Session 6

3:00 to 4:50

Detecting Lying and Deception for CFEs

Jerry Balistreri, M.S., M.Ed., DTE

This training is specialized and targeted to assist in the interview process. Foundations of the training will be centered on reading body language, the science of lying, and examination of the content and structure of interviewee’s that may be deceptive.

Learning Objectives

This training offers the following objectives for participants:

    • Describe the three requirements to detecting deception.
    • Recognize the limbic system and its role in non-verbal communication.
    • List the mental gymnastics that liars perform.
    • Detect deception in any situation.

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