Check Your Biases at the Door

Hal Humphreys, CFE, reminds us to examine our motivation for pursuing fraud and check our biases at the door.

Check Your Biases at the Door

By Hal Humphreys, CFE

June 2015 

Hi. I’m Hal Humphreys. I’m a Certified Fraud Examiner (CFE). I work for the defense.

As I was standing outside at the local ACFE chapter meeting, sheltering from the rain under a restaurant awning whilst waiting on my cab, I overheard a conversation.

The first CFE was bragging about shutting down a mom-and-pop grocery store for keeping two sets of books, one for register sales and another for “all cash” sales. “I just love busting people,” he said.

It was your standard lunch meeting: guest speaker, wooden chicken, mixed vegetables. The guest speaker, the local public defender, received a less than enthusiastic welcome. It seems that the entire group of CFEs assembled was employed by prosecution teams. Others worked for government agencies and reckoned themselves fraud-fighting detectives on a mission.

I witnessed the bias of the group making a gracious guest speaker feel uncomfortable. She asked for a show of hands: “How many of you ever do work for the defense?”

The room was quiet and dead still. I was sitting at a table in the middle of the room with my hand held high and my head held high and sweat pouring down my neck. I got a few sympathetic glances, more than a few looks of contempt and the rest just pretended not to notice.

To be fair, I also work as a contract investigator for the State of Tennessee, helping them identify potential cases of fraudulent behavior so they can fight fraud. But yes, I work for the defense.

As a private investigator, I am in search of facts. I really do not care who’s guilty or who’s not. I just want to gather facts. Good facts, bad facts; it doesn’t really matter to me. I just want to gather facts. Once I have facts, then I can analyze them, review them, mull them over, study them, craft a narrative, tell a story and draw my conclusions. But even then, I’m not comfortable with the idea of “busting” people.

To take joy in busting someone, I think, requires a certain degree of sureness that the person being busted is in some way guilty. There are a number of problems with that, I think. Here’s the first one:

“… No opinion shall be expressed regarding the guilt or innocence of any person or party.” – ACFE Code of Ethics

You see, not only is working a case with a prosecutorial bias, the desire to “bust” someone, dangerous in an intellectual sense, but CFEs are not allowed to express any opinion about guilt or innocence.

Another small problem — and granted, this is just a technicality, really — we have this concept here in the U.S. that says, basically, a person accused of a crime is presumed innocent until found guilty.

One final problem with the idea of approaching a case with a “let’s bust ‘em” mentality deals with good facts and bad facts. Whether working for the prosecution or the defense, I strive to present all of the facts, good or bad, to my clients.

If one approaches a case with a preconceived notion of guilt on the part of the defendant, it would be pretty easy to just present the facts that support a conclusion of guilty. But, again, this is addressed in the ACFE Code of Ethics:

“ … will reveal all material matters discovered during the course of an examination which, if omitted, could cause a distortion of the facts.” – ACFE Code of Ethics

I believe that most of CFEs are good, well-intentioned professionals. I believe that we work for facts and truth and, dare I say, justice. I’ve been impressed with the professional CFEs I meet at theACFE Global Fraud Conference.

A friend, a fellow PI and retired FBI Agent, once told me:

“I have no problem working for the defense. I’m a patriot. I love this country. I’m more interested in working for the [U.S.] Constitution than the prosecution or the defense.” Facts. Facts and information. Good or bad. Just work to uncover the truth. That was his advice.

There’s a district attorney’s office near my hometown that has the following motto on their website: “Pursuing Guilt.”

This frightens me. I can get behind pursuing justice, vigorously. I can get behind pursuing truth, vigorously. But pursuing guilt? “I just love busting people.” Seems a little closed-minded.

In an effort to do superior work, let’s all check our biases at the door and approach our work with an open mind and a search for facts and truth … and maybe even justice.

I’m Hal Humphreys. I work for the defense … and the prosecution.