ACFE News

CFEs elect two members to 2021-2022 Board of Regents

Fellow Certified Fraud Examiners elected Alexandra Sagaro, CFE, and Hannibal “Mike” Ware, CFE, to the 2021-2022 ACFE Board of Regents from candidates selected by the Board’s nomination committee. The two new regents took office at the Board’s virtual meeting in February. They replaced Bethmara Kessler, CFE, and Eric R. Feldman, CFE, CIG, CCEP-I, who’ve served from 2019 to 2021.

“The ACFE heartily thanks Bethmara and Eric for their enthusiastic work and expert insights on behalf of our members,” says Bruce Dorris, J.D., CFE, CPA, president and CEO of the ACFE. “And we welcome Alexandra and Mike to the Board of Regents as they build onto the good works of our volunteer leaders.”

Alexandra Sagaro, MSS, CFE, FCLS

Director of Enterprise Risk Management Program

Raymond James Financial

St. Petersburg, Florida

Under the leadership of Alexandra Sagaro, MSS, CFE, FCLS, the Raymond James Financial Enterprise Fraud Risk Management Program works on developing technology and resources to mitigate risk while investigating complaints of fraud and meeting regulatory filing requirements for suspicious activity.

For 17½ years, Sagaro was a member of the Tallahassee (Florida) Police Department, Florida Department of Insurance Fraud and Florida Department of Law Enforcement. She worked on state and federal task forces for violent crime investigations, money laundering, insurance fraud and public corruption. She held management and leadership positions, including the Region 4 coordinator for emergency management responsiveness, high-liability trainer and firearms instructor.

Sagaro transitioned to the private sector where she worked for 4½ years in the insurance industry consulting on projects for sinkhole fraud and the sinkhole managed repair program — a major problem in Florida.

At Raymond James Financial, where she’s worked since 2017, she also managed teams in the Anti-Money Laundering and Financial Crimes Management Department, focusing on mitigating money laundering, terrorist financing and fraudulent activity through transactional analysis within the Financial Intelligence Unit and the Fraud Investigations Team.

Sagaro earned her master’s degree in social sciences, executive management, from Florida State University in 2002.

Hannibal “Mike” Ware, CFE

Inspector general

U.S. Small Business Administration

Washington, D.C.

Hannibal “Mike” Ware, CFE, was sworn in as inspector general at the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) on May 24, 2018, following his confirmation by the U.S. Senate.

Ware is responsible for independent oversight of SBA’s programs and operations. As a result of SBA’s role in the nation’s pandemic response, Ware is providing oversight of more than a trillion dollars of lending authority aimed at stabilizing the nation’s economy and providing vital capital to the nation’s small businesses.

He’s a statutory member of the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency’s (CIGIE) Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC). Ware chairs the PRAC Subcommittee on Audits and the CIGIE Audit Committee, and is a member of CIGIE’s executive council.

Prior to his appointment as inspector general, Ware served as the deputy inspector general from April 2016 to January 2017, and the acting inspector general from January 2017. Ware has 30 years of experience within the OIG community with the first 26 years at the U.S. Department of Interior Office of Inspector General.

Ware is a native of the U.S. Virgin Islands. He holds a bachelor’s degree in accounting from the University of the Virgin Islands. He’s a graduate of the U.S. federal Senior Executive Service Career Development Program. Ware has received numerous awards throughout his career, including several from CIGIE as recognition for his significant work in the IG community.

Paul Kilby is new editor-in-chief of Fraud Magazine

Paul Kilby, an editor and journalist with more than two decades of experience, has replaced Dick Carozza, CFE, who’s retiring as the editor-in-chief of the ACFE’s flagship publication Fraud Magazine.

“I am excited about joining Fraud Magazine as editor-in-chief and look forward to working with the ACFE team to help build on the tremendous success of the publication,” Kilby says. “Fraud was a topic that always fascinated me during my many years as a financial journalist and editor, and I am thrilled to cover the subject in greater depth.”

Kilby has more than a decade of experience writing about global financial markets. He most recently was editor of the U.S. credit division of International Financing Review, a publication of Refinitiv, a global provider of financial market data and infrastructure. Kilby led a team of reporters and data analysts who covered the capital markets in the Americas. Prior to that, he focused on Latin American financial markets as editor of LatinFinance Magazine.

“Journalism plays a vital role in ultimately helping to expose wrongdoing among government officials and across the corporate world, and I look forward to working on a magazine that contributes to fighting fraud at all levels,” Kilby says.

“Fraud Magazine is a pivotal resource for our members around the world, and we take immense pride in publishing it,” says ACFE President and CEO Bruce Dorris, J.D., CFE, CPA.

IN MEMORIAM

Regent Emeritus Bryn Edward Arthur Madge, CFE

Regent Emeritus Bryn Edward Arthur Madge, CFE, 80, of Quebeck, Tennessee, died Oct. 11, 2020.

Ed Madge, an active member of the ACFE since 1993, was a member of the Board of Regents from 1997 to 1998. He received the CFE of the Year honor in 2002.

“I met Ed when I became a Regent, and at the time I was a City of Baltimore prosecutor and he was a detective sergeant at Broward Sheriff’s Office in Florida,” says Isabel M. Cumming, CFE, City of Baltimore inspector general.

“We had much in common and were so proud to be selected a Regent by our peers. Ed was funny, smart and believed in everything the ACFE stood for — integrity and truth,” says Cumming. “As Regents, we developed lasting friendships and have stayed in touch for years. Rest in peace, my friend."

Madge was a detective sergeant supervisor at Broward Sheriff’s Office in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, from 1981 to 2003. He entered law enforcement in 1967 as a patrolman in the Sunrise (Florida) Police Department and then served as a detective sergeant for 10 years in the Lauderhill (Florida) Police Department. Madge was a senior airman in the U.S. Air Force from 1959 to 1964.

Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes

Former U.S. Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes of Maryland, 87, a longtime friend of the ACFE, and one of the co-sponsors of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX), passed away Dec. 7, 2020, in Baltimore, Maryland.

Sarbanes joined the Hon. Michael Oxley at the 18th Annual ACFE Fraud Conference & Exhibition in 2007 to discuss their landmark legislation to curb fraudulent accounting practices that led to huge bankruptcies at Enron, WorldCom and Tyco, among many others. SOX created the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board that oversees the audits of public companies in the U.S.

“We felt that [Sarbanes-Oxley] strengthens the statutory infrastructure that was set out in the legislation of the 1930s to address problems of that author’s legislation that he could not have anticipated,” said Sarbanes during the conference. “I think we’re in the continuing process of restoring honest, transparent, ethical business practices,” he said.

ACFE President and CEO Bruce Dorris, J.D., CFE, CPA, said that Sarbanes “had such a tremendous influence on the anti-fraud community with the passage of SOX after the fraud scandals of the early 2000s.

“When he keynoted our conference in 2007, I distinctly remember he and his wife staying around and visiting breakout sessions to get an even better understanding of the impact of SOX and what CFEs do. He had a brilliant mind and will be sorely missed,” Dorris said.

“Senator Sarbanes had recently retired when he spoke at our conference,” said ACFE Communications Director Kevin Taparauskas, CFE. “He remains to this day the most genuine and down-to-earth keynote speaker that I’ve worked with in my time at the ACFE. Such a class act with a deep-seated love of his country.”

SOX addressed the crisis of investor confidence and improved corporate accountability, Sarbanes said in a 2007 Fraud Magazine interview. “If you don’t protect the interests of the investors, it deals a major blow to the workings of the economic system,” he said.

“Checks and balances are working again, and the watchdogs are functioning again as watchdogs,” he said. “For instance, we tried to get the auditors into a more independent position, so we precluded the auditors of a public company from providing a range of consulting services that were seen as carrying with them a conflict of interest.” (See Sarbanes-Oxley Act Revisited, by Dick Carozza, CFE, Fraud Magazine, May/June 2007.)

According to his obituary in The New York Times, Sarbanes was the son of two Greek immigrants who ran a restaurant in Salisbury, Maryland. He graduated from Princeton University on full scholarship, was a Rhodes Scholar and earned a Harvard law degree in 1960.

After retiring, Sarbanes, unlike many senators, rejected the idea of taking a position at a Washington law firm, according to the Times obituary. If he had, he told friends, sooner or later he would be asked to take on the distasteful choice of lobbying a former colleague.