Mary Breslin, CFE, CIA President, Empower Audit When I was a teenager my mother was diagnosed with cancer and died two years later after battling the disease. My mother’s illness was heartbreaking to witness, but it was how quickly the idea of normal ceased to exist that was surprising. Having a clean home, clean clothing, […]
Mary Breslin, CFE, CIA President, Empower Audit Other than spiders, one of my greatest fears is hearing that I taught someone to commit fraud. One of the challenges auditors face is persuading management to implement preventive fraud controls without inadvertently teaching them how to commit the fraud. Unfortunately, sometimes we have to explain in great […]
Last week I taught a course on leveraging data analytics to detect fraud. I love teaching fraud courses and have had a decade-and-a-half love affair with data analytics — specifically what a mature analytics program can do for an organization. When teaching, my favorite moment is seeing the lightbulb go on for class participants when […]
I’ve had a lot of professional nicknames over the years. “Scary Mary” was popular for quite some time, but more recently people have called me “Nancy” as in Negative Nancy. I don’t think I’m negative — I’m more of a realist, or I just have an appropriate amount of professional skepticism. Lately the target of […]
Mary Breslin, CFE, CIA President, Empower Audit Organizations with highly unethical cultures, such as Enron, do not happen overnight; it’s often a series of incremental changes. Many of you have heard the story of the frog and boiling pot: They say that if you put a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will […]