The Fraud Examiner

ACFE Chapter Vice President Challenges Complacency in Fraud Fighting

February 2018

ACFE Member Profile
David Kirtland, CFE, CIA, CRMA
Compliance Manager
AXIA Partners

David Kirtland, CFE, CIA, CRMA, is not one to slow down any time soon in his fight against fraud. Since joining the ACFE in 2013, the current compliance manager at AXIA Partners has kept extremely active in continued learning. “It is so important for us as anti-fraud professionals to guard against complacency in our development because the people committing fraud are not stagnant,” Kirtland said. “Fraud is a continuously evolving thing that is constantly trying to gain and retain the upper hand, and if we do not continuously seek out new knowledge, we will quickly become irrelevant.” He is also a pillar in the anti-fraud community — Kirtland serves as program director and vice president for the ACFE Houston Chapter.

How did you become passionate about fighting fraud?

I grew up in a small town in Texas near Houston and fraud always seemed like something that only happened in the big city. As I began to study accounting for my undergraduate degree, I saw how fraud was a major concern for businesses, regardless of whether they operated in a small town or in a large city. As I began my career in internal audit, I saw how much fraud can affect people, both professionally and personally. I became interested in how fraudsters learned to bypass controls as well as how they rationalized their behaviors. I decided that I needed to put myself in a position to try to help corporations and individuals protect and educate themselves on fraud so they had a fighting chance.