This is what Frank Hydoski absolutely relishes: solving the 10-ton inscrutable case that involves millions of documents and electronic files, jumbled databases, conflicting testimonies, and convoluted ledgers.
After decades of investigations, Hydoski, a director in the New York office of Deloitte Financial Advisory Services LLP, says, "I'm no longer troubled by lots of data. In fact, I find it comforting!"
Hydoski sharpened his analytical skills as chief of forensics for the Independent Inquiry Committee into the United Nations Oil-for-Food Programme and as the leader of a multi-nation team investigating assets of Holocaust Victims in Swiss banks.
"Volumes of information in corporate and international investigations can indeed be daunting," says Hydoski. "However, I don't usually focus on volumes initially - and not just to postpone the inevitable panic. Rather, I work with my team to figure out the basic question or issue driving the investigation. ... Without a clear grasp of the basic question, it is very easy to become confused and engage in wasted efforts."
Though Hydoski always uses intricate IT methods to solve his cases, he believes his team inevitably answers questions with healthy doses of intuition. "I think of investigations, whether they are about fraud or some other aspect of forensic accounting as involving a conjunction of intuition, methodology, and technology," he says. "None are sufficient themselves. For example, I've seen too many investigations that are conducted as though they were 'agreed-upon procedures,' or pure methodology. These lead, it would seem inevitably, to null findings, whether there is substance to concerns or not. Likewise, pure technology is insufficient. ... The element of intuition, creativity, intelligence ... is essential to the investigatory experience. I think anyone who has sat around with a boatload of computer results and is trying to figure what they mean would agree to this notion."
Hydoski will be one of the keynoters at the 17th Annual ACFE Fraud Conference & Exhbition, July 9 - 14 in Las Vegas. He spoke to Fraud Magazine from his office in New York City.
Most of us are daunted when we have to analyze massive quantities of data. Do you have a standard set of procedures when you first confront a case with tens of thousands - possibly millions - of documents and financial records?
Volumes of information in corporate and international investigations can indeed be daunting. Often there are millions of documents and electronic files, very significant numbers of databases, and enterprise-wide systems, such as accounting and payables to deal with. However, I don't usually focus on volumes initially - and not just to postpone the inevitable panic. Rather, I work with my team to figure out the basic question or issue driving the investigation and information we need to gather in order to answer the basic question, as well as who owns the information, what form is it in, how we can get it, what we will need from a technical perspective to use it, and so forth. The first step, figuring out what we are trying to find out about, is essential and more difficult than it sounds. Without a clear grasp of the basic question, it is very easy to become confused and engage in wasted efforts.
Let me describe an example. For decades it was thought that the basic question about Holocaust Victim assets in Swiss banks was something like "are there dormant accounts in the banks that belong to Victims or their heirs?" Although we began that investigation with this question in mind, it soon became clear that investigating dormant accounts alone would not fully address Victim assets. Instead, the real question was "is there evidence that Victim accounts were closed by the banks without consent?" When the point of the investigation was put in this way, it was clear that one had to look for accounts that were no longer present in the banks, but would have been, "but for" conduct by the banks. This realization led us to a very different information collection strategy that resulted in a massive amount of information and data. Coming back to your question, I guess I'm no longer troubled by lots of data. In fact, I find it comforting! And the great thing about computers is that they never get tired.
What are the basic steps you take when you begin a complex forensic analysis investigation using information technology?
Because real life is complicated, actual investigations take many forms. However, here's the general methodology we use.
First, we carefully analyze the questions driving the investigation, including how the business or underlying transactions work, who or what entities are involved. Allied with understanding the key question is the need to put some dimension around the problem. We call this top-down analysis, and it helps us to get an idea how much potential fraud or misappropriation or whatever we are looking for there could be. To get some idea of the total amounts held in Swiss banks by Victims of the Holocaust, we obtained and read each bank's filings with the Swiss National Bank for the 1933 through 1945 period regarding amounts held by non-Swiss nationals. We then cumulated the amounts for the countries from which most Holocaust Victims came, and used these totals as the theoretical upper limit of the holdings of Victims. Even though the upper limit was overstated, because it was for all nationals for a given country and not just Victims, it was far less than some of the wilder allegations and helped us get our arms around the magnitude of the amounts we were seeking.
Second, we figure out whether there is existing information that will help answer the questions, where it is, how much is already in electronic format and how much will have to be converted. We also try to estimate the volume of data.
Third, depending on types of data, the technical infrastructure we will use is defined and put in place. Getting the infrastructure in place, meaning the hardware and software, is a key step.
Fourth, we develop something that system development professionals call a logical data model, which is an idealized view of how all the data will fit together in the application we will build to house and analyze the data.
Fifth, we acquire the data and adjust it for the application. Usually, we get data from many sources and have to standardize names, dates, things like that. Next, we begin running analyses that are designed to explore the data, including looking for data holes that have to be plugged using estimating techniques, and then we develop preliminary answers.
Lastly, we complete the analysis and document the system. Most importantly, there should be a record of data manipulations performed and facts in the database that should be sourced in a verifiable manner. I should note that in large investigations, these last three steps are very time-consuming and usually require months to complete.
What were the findings of the Volcker Committee investigation into Swiss banks?
As the Volcker Committee reported, we found evidence that the banks had made concerted efforts to deny Victims and their heirs' access to assets and records about assets, and that the banks had transferred Victim assets to Nazi authorities, without the owners freely given permission. We also found that the banks had transferred Victim assets to the bank's own accounts. Lastly, we found that there were relatively few dormant accounts belonging to Victims still open in the banks. In other words, the real story was in the closed accounts. There is an ongoing attempt to return assets to their rightful owners being conducted by the Claims Resolution Tribunal operating in Zurich, which reports to a U.S. District Court Judge. To date, I believe they have made payments in the hundreds of millions of dollars. I should note that the vast majority of account records we reviewed showed no signs of wrongdoing.
One of the amusing stories about this investigation that I like to tell is that we worked five levels underground in the vault of the former private bank of one of the three big banks in Switzerland. Literally in a vault! And there were more than 100 of us working in that vault. The best part, though, is that there was an underground river running between us and the surface. It was all very unsettling. We called ourselves the troglodytes.
Can you briefly describe the allegations of fraud that were made against the participants in the United Nations Oil-for-Food Programme(OFFP)?
Yes, I think so. There were fraud allegations at several levels. First, UN officials were accused of personally profiting or allowing their family members to personally profit from the OFFP. The allegations were that this happened either directly through transactions, as in the case of Benon Sevan, the director of the OFFP, or, indirectly through service contracts let by the UN, as in the case of Kojo Annan, the Secretary General's son. Second, the UN as an institution was accused of self-dealing. In effect, the UN paid itself an administrative fee for every barrel of oil sold. The allegation was that the fee became an incentive to disregard the problems in the OFFP. Third, there were allegations that Saddam Hussein's government received bribes and kickbacks from vendors. Finally, a variety of third parties, ranging from politicians to business people to journalists, were accused of illegitimately profiting from the Programme, to the detriment of the Iraqi people.
What were the basic procedures you used in developing analytical databases for the Oil-for-Food case?
Essentially, the development of these databases, and there were several of them, followed our general methodology. Describing the development of one of them, the contract database, would probably help with understanding. When we began, and this fact continues to amaze me, there were no reliable statistics on the contracts in the OFFP, and there were varying reports on the amounts expended for humanitarian aid. To address this lack of information and to start to develop the basic facts about the contracts so we could answer the question as to whether the contracts were associated with bribes and kickbacks, we looked for information in the UN and found a database of contracts and payments maintained by the treasury department, a database maintained by the Office of the Iraq Programme with details of the contracts, important facts about payments in the accounting system, especially oil sale revenue bookings and bookings relevant to expenditures for goods, which we used to check the completeness and accuracy of the treasury records. By piecing these three together into one application, we began to form a fairly complete picture of the contracts from the UN point of view, from which we could do basic reporting.
Next, and as a result of canvassing the Iraqi ministries, we obtained detailed records from Iraq. Based on the work of our analysts, we were able to add to the application the details from the Iraqi side of the contracts, including kickbacks levied and paid, as well as, for the oil contracts details of the beneficiaries of the oil purchase contracts. Now we were able not only to describe the contracts, but we could also describe in some detail their illicit aspects. As a result of help from member governments of the United Nations, we added payment details of the transactions drawn from banking records. These were the capstone of the arch. They allowed us to confirm the information we gained from the Iraqi records. All of this stuff went into one analytical database, the purpose of which was to answer the question of whether Iraq received illicit income as a result of the OFFP and whether there was fraud in the contracts. The answer was yes in both cases.
In the Oil-for-Food investigation, you were responsible for electronic discovery and the selection and organization of the vast numbers of documents relevant to the organization, estimated at 13 million pages. How did you approach this situation? What was the biggest challenge in the investigation? We did two things more or less simultaneously. First, we combed through the UN and its agencies identifying pockets of relevant information, both hard copy and electronic. We also worked with the Iraqi government to gain relevant information from their ministries and banks. We acquired information from companies involved with the OFFP, and, very importantly, from banking and other information from governmental authorities around the world. This led to the 13 million pages that we collected and to the hundreds of email boxes, desktop computers and so forth that we also collected and processed. Second, as we were identifying and collecting information, we scanned the hard copy documents and put them in a text-retrieval database so they would be immediately searchable. We also included in the database emails, diaries, telephone records, bank records, and anything else we collected for which text searching made sense. This was a vital step in the process, and one of our greater challenges due to the timing requirements. It gave our investigators and analysts more or less immediate access to a database of vast amounts of information, which was immediately and constantly in use in interviews and analyses leading to our reports.
In the Oil-for-Food investigation, you were also responsible for the report chapters dealing with accounting treatments, the effectiveness of the oversight functions, the banking function, and the quantification of illicit income gained by Iraq. What did you learn about fraud reconstruction, detection, and prevention methods while investigating for those reports? What was the eventual outcome in the Oil-for-Food investigation?
Let me start with the last first because it is easier for me to address. The findings on these subjects were clear, and, I add from my perspective, troubling. Regarding accounting treatments, we found that the audited financial statements during the later years of the OFFP should have been restated to reflect the manipulations of the accounts by some of the UN managers, which had the effect of understating the expenses of the UN and making it appear that administering the OFFP was more efficient than in fact it was. On the positive side, we also found that the United Nations was not self-dealing in regard to the use of administrative funds, that they were, with one notable exception, quite scrupulous in how they treated the money they collected, and in fact that they returned substantial sums to the Iraq Development Fund. The notable exception to this finding had to do with overcharging. One of our forensic accountants found some entries in the books of one of the United Nations agencies that made no sense. He investigated and unraveled an episode in 2003 and 2004 that had the effect of overcharging by almost $50 million [U.S.]. When this was brought this to the attention of the United Nations, the UN agreed with our characterization and took steps to repay the Iraqis.
Oversight was, quite simply, underwater. There were always fewer than eight internal auditors assigned to monitor the OFFP, and often fewer than five, even though it was worldwide, inherently risky, and involved a total cash flow of $110 billion [U.S.], a very big number. Our findings were that the internal auditors were a dedicated group, but they were swamped, and that very few audits occurred during the first three years of the program. Moreover, the UN never conducted a credible risk analysis of the OFFP and never therefore put forward a risk assessment that addressed the key issues of the adequacy of the OFFP for the Iraqis, the dangers it imposed to the effectiveness of Security Council resolutions, and the abuses by the then government of Iraq, contracting parties, and third parties. We found that the external auditors had an overly narrow view of their mission. For example, the auditors tested contracts for oil sales and goods purchases but did not make inquiries beyond the accounting and payments in the UN system. The auditors reasoned that fraudulent prices were not their responsibility.
Next, we found that the bank used by the UN to receive revenue and make payments was embroiled in conflicts of interest because it was trying to serve both the UN and its other clients, who included oil companies and goods providers. We also found evidence that the bank was involved in structuring the oil purchases in a way that allowed asset-less entities to appear to be purchasing the oil, whereas in fact the purchasers were bona fide oil companies standing in the background and underwriting the asset-less companies. This allowed the oil companies to disclaim knowledge of the bribes because they were paid by the companies in the foreground.
In terms of illicit income to the former government of Iraq, there is no question that Hussein's regime realized approximately $2 billion [U.S.] in bribes and kickbacks paid by thousands of companies and individuals, as well as around $11 billion [U.S.] in illicit oil sales.
What did I learn? Not a great deal about detection and prevention, except maybe that if everyone decides it is not their job and if they don't look for fraud, it will thrive. What I learned about reconstruction is a little more interesting. This is one of the few times that I've worked with former federal prosecutors experienced in putting together criminal cases involving fraud and corruption. Our teams worked very hard to prove not only that bribe payments were made but that certain people actually made the payments or instructed their agents to do so, or, in the case of Mr. Sevan [OFFP director], actually received the consideration. Going to a more fundamental level of proof, that's one thing I learned. Another, and this was quite interesting to me, is the work we did correlating events. A key part of our analysis of the Sevan case involved juxtaposing the adoption of certain policies by the UN that had been sought by the Iraqis, with patterns of telephone calls and bank withdrawals and deposits, including the structured nature of the transactions, on the one hand, and with travel records and recollections of meetings by witnesses, on the other. Some of this was quite masterful and depended less on big database programs and more on detailed analyses using spreadsheets. Several ACFE members did superb work in this area.
What did you learn from Paul Volcker, the former head of the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank, who chaired both the Oil-for-Food and Holocaust Victims' assets committees?Paul Volcker is one of the great men of our times. He is brilliant, his mind is extremely agile, he has a great grasp of policy, he is well read, he has a focus on both big things and small, he works very hard, and in fact never seems to be idle. Moreover, he continues to be involved in things and events that really matter. He does not have a fixed political point of view, but rather operates by political principles that he employs flexibly.
In terms of what I have learned from him, I would have to say first and foremost is the value of unwavering integrity. Second, Mr. Volcker helped me hold fast to a way of conducting myself that I have always tried to maintain. He does not judge arguments or findings by any measure other than the simple rationality test: do the findings make sense, are they internally consistent, are they adequately laid out? A person's reputation, or stature, or charm does not matter when he evaluates what is being said. The third thing might seem a little unusual, but you should remember this is the man who took on Congress and the President in the late 1970s in his fight to tame inflation in the United States. Mr. Volcker taught me that things in public life, and this would include an investigation like that of the United Nations, have political dimensions and inevitably power ebbs and flows depending on fortune and skill. I learned by working with him and watching him that one must pay close attention to the political element of investigations and try to time events in a way that increase the possibility of a sound investigation rather than allowing advantage and investigatory power to slide away.
There is one other thing that Mr. Volcker has tried to teach me, but for better or worse he failed. He thinks I'm too exact, or that I try to be. In fact, when I introduced my son Joseph to him, he asked Joseph if he was as punctilious as I am. We've had many discussions about how exact one can be in investigations and he keeps trying to convince me to round to the nearest billion! I joke with him that only a central banker and macro-economist of his stature could get away with that.
Can you describe some other cases in the past - large or small - that you found intriguing or initially puzzling?To be honest, all of my projects, whether they are investigations or they arise from litigations, involve puzzling matters and finding out about things that are not known. I think this is true of forensic accounting and fraud examination in general. Often, people think that forensic accountants and examiners are hired to find out what people know but won't tell you. While this is certainly part of it, I have come to the view that our real mission is to find out what nobody knows, which is to say we are hired to reconstruct a whole picture, whether that is a financial matter or something larger like the OFFP. Further, I like to say that frauds are not so much as detected as they are stumbled over. The ACFE may help to change this, or at least accelerate the discovery process, by the terrific work it does in education and certification. Both education and certification help raise awareness on the part of people in a position to do something, which is a key issue.
One last thing on this - my office looks down on the pit where the Twin Towers used to be. Every day, looking at the site serves to remind me just how important the question of what we don't know is, and the need to think about that question and worry about it. We have precious few windows into what goes on in financial matters. My hope is that auditing, internal and external, if they are informed by a special awareness of fraud, can keep windows open and perhaps even open additional windows.
What types of software did you use in your international investigations? Do you now customize your own systems depending on the project?
For investigations involving large volumes of transactional data, such as the OFFP investigation, we usually use SQL Server as the relational database management tool. Typically, we use Access for smaller cases as well as for a front end to SQL databases. For helping to find relationships between entities, we use visualization software such as I2. For statistical operations, we use SAS. We also use specialized computer forensic hardware and software for taking and processing computer images. Lastly, we use specialized software for processing electronic mail and other user files, for storing and searching large document databases, and so forth.
Almost all of our applications are custom. This is due to the very different circumstances of each investigation, as well as to the need we face of taking data from many different applications and sources. That said, there are several areas emerging from the conjunction of forensic accounting and technology for which we are seeing something like products emerge. At Deloitte FAS, for example, we are working on developing continuous monitoring software that can help detect potential signs of procurement fraud and accounting fraud.
What kinds of investigations are you working on for Deloitte FAS?I can't be too specific because of client confidentiality. However, generally speaking, I am part of a very large forensic accounting and technology group, and I am presently working on an asset recovery matter and an investigation of whether an international financial institution has complied with regulatory requirements. I should also note that we are very busy working on next generation forensic technology issues.
What fascinates you most about fraud examiners and forensic analysts using information technology? Looking in your crystal ball, what's the future for this field?
What I find most fascinating are the puzzle-solving aspects of fraud examination and forensic analysis. And while I know it sounds corny, the moral aspects. It's a great intellectual feeling to crack a fraud as well as a great moral feeling. Undoing a scheme that is harming others or has harmed them is just as intrinsically interesting and good. Taking this sense into the future, I think that by using the field of predictive analytics, with which we are working here at Deloitte FAS, we may be able to further our ability to help monitor for some types of frauds on a real time basis, especially frauds involving claims, payables, coding of accounting entries, and construction of balance sheets, among others. We are also focusing on the social psychological aspects of fraud, which is very pertinent to the fraud examiner. Developing heuristics and tools to help companies figure out how to set aggressive goals, on the one hand, and help avoid fraudulent behavior by personnel, on the other, are some of the things that we think are not too far away.
Most fraud examiners don't have an IT background but know they must investigate using information technology to facilitate forensic analysis. What advice would you give a motivated but nervous neophyte?
First, fraud examiners need to use information technology to do their work, but they also need to be able to look into systems created by others because increasingly that is where the fraud is. This is more difficult than simply using information technology. My advice is twofold. Remember that the information technology world is rule-driven and that even frauds depend on rules. Put yourself in the mindset of the fraudsters. Would they try to hide things by mischaracterization or some other means? What sort of process would they put in place to create the fraudulent edifice? What would you need to do to find it? Think about this systematically, asking about sufficient and necessary conditions and workflow. Also, always remember that while computers are great hiding places, there is always a path to what has been hidden. Second, do what I have done and find people well-schooled in information technology to assist you. However, one has to keep in mind the fact that not all information technology professionals are well suited for this kind of work. The best are probably unusual. They not only have an interest in systems but also an interest in the data, including what the data means and what can be done with it. Even if you are a one-person operation, bite the bullet and bring someone on part time to help you with this stuff. Information technology in the dual sense, both having to rely on it to do your work and having to use it to find out from it what happened, is now central to forensic accounting and fraud examination.
What does this fraud examiner need to know when hiring an external digital evidence forensic analyst?I think there are four things to focus on. First, what tools do they use for taking images, what are their controls on things like chain of custody, what are their procedures to prevent evidence spoliation, what certifications do they have, and how sound are their labs? These are the really big issues. If they are not right, then the whole effort is not worth it. Second, and this will be key in any large scale investigation, can the analyst successfully operate in a network environment? Can they capably use enterprise software to take desk top images? Third, what tools do they use for analyzing the digital evidence once it is acquired and what are their processing capabilities? One of the problems often faced is that analysts can take and process images, but they do not have the ability to suppress duplicate messages across mailboxes or to piece together streams of communications across mailboxes. Lastly, and this is very important in a context like the United Nations investigation, there is a sort of bed-side manner issue. I usually put it to myself like this: can I really trust them to take proper care when they show up in the CEO suite? Of course, there are also cost and convenience in timing and things like that. It should go unsaid that once the things I've noted are put into the equation, then one would consider cost and convenience.
Broadly, what areas do you think you'll cover during your General Session talk at the 17th Annual ACFE Conference & Exhibition?
I'm going to try to weave together personal experiences and the stories of some of the large investigations on which I've worked, especially from the point of view of problems faced and how the problems were overcome. Also, I hope to sketch out some of the complexities of the investigations so that it will be clear just what was involved in them. I will likely focus on the Swiss and United Nations investigations.
Software can help analyze and find anomalies among huge databases but investigations often turn on human intuition. How have your years of experience taught you to look at forensic results and make the crucial connections and conclusions?
This is likely the most crucial question you've asked. I think of investigations, whether they are about fraud or some other aspect of forensic accounting as involving a conjunction of intuition, methodology, and technology. None are sufficient unto themselves. For example, I've seen too many investigations that are conducted as though they were "agreed-upon procedures," or pure methodology. These lead, it would seem inevitably, to null findings, whether there is substance to concerns or not. Likewise, pure technology is insufficient. I think there is always an element of intuition or creativity in these matters.
I remember the night in the vault in Switzerland, when I was reviewing a list of name matches between Holocaust Victims and bank account owners, where the names were the same or very close matches but there was none of the other information in the records to confirm that they were the same people. In other words, neither the methodology we were working with nor the technology could help me with the fundamental question of were these the same people. The lists were typically hundreds and thousands of pages long because we did the name matches in large batches of Victim names - and this is another whole story. As my eyes numbingly moved down the lists of names and very little other information I began to notice a pattern. Because the lists were in alphabetical order, I came to see, on both sides, the names of family members. There was no other agreed-upon corroborating information, such as address, city, country, just the names. Because the names on the accounts, in those days, frequently included all senior members of a family, and because the Nazis were cruelly efficient in terms of murdering all members of families, the two lined up. I felt strongly on seeing this that I was seeing proof of identity. Because identity was one our most vexing issues, I put forward the hypothesis that among other things we should decide that we had identity matches if we encountered the same family names in the bank and Victim lists. All parties in the investigation, including the banks, agreed with this proposition. This led us to many confirmations of Victim accounts.
I would strongly suggest, and have many times seen, that the element of intuition, creativity, intelligence, or, quite simply, thinking about what one is doing, is essential to the investigatory enterprise. I think anyone who has sat around with a boatload of computer results and is trying to figure what they mean would agree to this notion.
What advice would you give new (and not so new) fraud examiners who discover they have an aptitude for high-tech forensic analysis and want to pursue that field?
Try to join one of the large firms in the business of investigations or forensic accounting, and, in doing so, stress that you have a grasp of fraud and how technology can help to uncover it. This is still an area where there's no academic degree or form of certification that would qualify one. For the most part, qualification is a matter of core skills married to on-the-job training and experience, assuming a basic aptitude. The bigger accounting and investigatory firms now have groups that provide forensic technology services such as computer forensics and database creation. These firms need people who understand how frauds work and how technology can be put to use in investigations. My view is that the best way to think about these additional skills is to think about forensic accountants or fraud examiners serving a bridge between accounting or fraud examination experience and technology-based analysis.
You earned your bachelor's degree from San Diego State University and your master's and doctorate from the University of Chicago. What are your degrees in?
All of my degrees are nominally in the area of political science, but the focus was always philosophy. My senior thesis, master's thesis, and Ph.D. dissertation dealt with subjects in the field of philosophy and attempted to address aspects of politics from that point of view. In retrospect, I can now see some connection between my concerns in those days and what I have been doing for the last 25 years. All three had to do with meaning, interpretation, and language, and especially interpretive systems - things no fraud examiner, investigator, or forensic accountant should ignore.
How did you come to be interested in this specialized field? Did you come to it through a circuitous route or did you directly pursue it?
Definitely, I came to this field through a circuitous route. The story I like to tell is that I was trying to figure out what to do around 1980 because it had become clear that my academic job was not a keeper. I knew I did not want to go to school anymore, and my wife told me that if I thought about my skill set I would understand that I had been trained, in Ph.D. school, to analyze things and that I could be an analyst. We lived in the Washington, D.C., area at the time, and happily there were jobs in that area with titles like analyst. I hooked up with Aspen Systems Corporation, through my wife's divine intervention, got a position as an analyst, and things sort of flowed from there.
I've got to say that it has been a great ride and probably a uniquely American story, which I hope will continue and be available for others.
What were your early professional interests besides IT?
For awhile, I thought I would be a professor, and in fact I taught at several universities. That gave way to what I've been pursuing for a long time, which is the use of technology in litigation and investigations, especially since I joined Price Waterhouse in the 1980s in a forensic accounting context. Interestingly, I've seen fraud rise higher and higher in my concerns and those of my colleagues, probably beginning in the mid 1990s. Even in the 1990s, however, I think most of us thought of fraud as sort of a marginal problem. The early years of this century taught us, I hope definitively, that that is not the case.
Who has influenced you the most in your career? Who are your mentors?This is a tough one. There is no question that Professor Henry Janssen has had the greatest influence on me. Happily, we have remained friends for more than 40 years. Henry is a Socratic philosopher and to this day he questions, questions, questions. In my professional life, I first learned the principles of information management from Mr. Eugene Wall, late of Aspen Systems Corporation. Mr. Wall, who was an engineer and lexicographer, first showed me how to store information in databases in such a way as to maximize its retrieval. In those days, the main tool was the controlled vocabulary that was used to classify documents. Somewhere in all of this is my wife, Diane Johnson, who helped lead me out of academia and to what I've been doing.
Most of what I know about technology I've learned from the many very competent staff and colleagues I've been privileged to work with over the years, and especially, Jeff Jordan, Todd Trivett, Craig Freeman, Brian Wycliff, J.D. Kuwica, Mary Eaton, Bruce Borden, Brian Castelli, Mandy Hwang, Samir Hans, and many, many others. I currently spend part of my time in a group within Deloitte FAS that includes 150 technology-oriented specialists who are involved in one aspect or another of litigations, investigations, or regulatory matters. It would be hard not to learn from a group like this.
In recent years, my friend and colleague, now chairman and CEO of Deloitte FAS, Frank Piantidosi, has taught me to be forward looking and has encouraged whatever innovative qualities I have. My great friend and colleague, Mary Jane Schirber, a partner at Deloitte FAS and with whom I've worked on many engagements, has taught me the nuances of forensic accounting and especially the fact that it is all about completeness in details and presentation.
I have also learned much from clients, and not just Mr. Volcker, who are too numerous to mention.
At the end of your work day, what gives you the most professional satisfaction?
No question, hands down, solving problems that threaten to impede investigations is the thing that gives me most satisfaction on a day-by-day basis. Over the long run, managing successful investigations is a great feeling. The feeling of satisfaction is probably heightened in both cases because of the risk of failure. I sometimes feel like I am way out on the end of a limb, especially after formulating a hunch and putting a lot of manpower into pursuing it. When it works, as it did in the Swiss bank project, it is a great feeling. Likewise, when particular theories or hunches work, it is a great feeling.
(The views in this article are those of the interviewee, and don't necessarily represent the views of Deloitte Financial Advosry Services. - ed.)
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