National Forum on Fraud and Corruption
may 25 & 26

In an era defined by hyper transparency and polarized expectations, Higher Ground reframes corporate ethics as a strategic imperative rather than a compliance exercise. Drawing from Alison Taylor’s research at NYU Stern and her advisory work in anti corruption and responsible business, the session outlines how organizations can navigate rising scrutiny, ESG backlash, and stakeholder fragmentation through disciplined priority setting and credible transparency.

The discussion distills the core shift facing assurance and antifraud professionals today: moving from rule based ethics to impact based leadership anchored in human rights and organizational culture. Participants will examine practical methodologies for establishing a small set of high leverage environmental and social goals, determining when and how to engage publicly on sensitive issues, and designing governance systems that foster integrity at scale.

By integrating real world cases from global companies confronting political pressure, supply chain risk, and trust deficits, this session equips leaders with a concise, actionable pathway to build resilient cultures and earn durable stakeholder confidence in a turbulent landscape.

Key Takeaways

• Shift from compliance to impact: Why legal adherence alone fails and how to operationalize an ethics model rooted in human outcomes.
• Disciplined prioritization: Focus on a limited set of issues where the company can influence outcomes meaningfully.
• Transparency that builds—not erodes—trust: Implement disclosures that clarify trade offs without escalating controversy.
• Address corruption at its roots: Combine standards, incentives, and culture to reduce misconduct effectively.
• Speak strategically on public issues: Apply clear criteria to decide when corporate advocacy aligns with purpose and capabilities.

A concise, high level roadmap for professionals seeking to elevate corporate integrity: focus where it matters, communicate with credibility, and lead with human centered principles to secure trust and long term strategic advantage

In a digital environment where anonymous harassment and misinformation escalate rapidly, this session provides a focused examination of one of North America’s most significant online defamation cases. Ryan Duquette—Partner in EY's Forensic & Integrity Services, Toronto and a court recognized expert—shows how investigators combined OSINT, data analytics, and forensic recovery techniques to trace fragmented digital activity back to a single perpetrator.

The presentation highlights the disciplined methodologies used to synthesize thousands of data points, correlate behavioral patterns, and recover deleted artifacts that proved decisive to the case. It also underscores the role of investigative governance, including ACFE aligned frameworks, in structuring digital inquiries and ensuring evidentiary integrity.

Finally, Ryan will address an increasingly critical issue: the vulnerability of investigators themselves. Drawing on extensive cyber incident response experience, he outlines essential operational security practices to minimize exposure during OSINT work and strategies to mitigate reputational risks in the event of targeted online defamation.

Key Takeaways

• Correlating digital evidence: How OSINT and analytics revealed hidden behavioral patterns across thousands of data points.
• Recovering the “smoking gun”: Digital forensics techniques that surfaced deleted evidence critical to attribution.
• Applying investigative standards: How ACFE aligned frameworks strengthened the case’s structure and credibility.
• Practicing investigator OPSEC: Essential precautions to avoid exposing personal data during online inquiries.
• Shielding your professional reputation: Steps investigators should take to prepare for and respond to defamatory threats.

A concise, high impact briefing for fraud examiners and forensic professionals seeking to strengthen their investigative rigor while protecting themselves in an era where anonymity, digital manipulation, and reputational attacks increasingly intersect with modern investigative practice.s

Important Notice Regarding This Session

In accordance with the speaker’s request, this session will not be recorded, archived, or made available for on demand viewing after the event.

The presentation may only be viewed live, either in person at the conference venue or through our official digital platform, and exclusively by registered participants at the time of delivery.

Access to the session’s case study and all related materials will remain strictly limited to the real time audience. We appreciate your understanding and cooperation in respecting these parameters.

As generative AI expands the capabilities of both professional and opportunistic fraudsters, organizations now face adversaries who operate with unprecedented scale, speed, and creativity. Fraud as a service models, synthetic identities, deepfakes, and automated attack kits have lowered technical barriers and enabled coordinated, real time exploitation of traditional controls. This session offers a clear, executive level framing of how these technologies are reshaping the threat landscape and what leaders must understand to respond effectively.

Biometric technologies—voice, face, and behavioral—have emerged as essential tools in strengthening identity assurance and countering AI enabled impersonation. Mr. Marchand will outline how organizations are deploying biometrics within layered architectures, balancing security and user experience while elevating detection precision. Participants will gain a grounded view of where biometrics deliver the greatest impact and how they integrate with device intelligence, network analytics, and anomaly based risk scoring.

The discussion also addresses investigative value, governance expectations, and the operational structures needed to sustain performance over time. From evidentiary standards and collaboration with law enforcement to privacy, fairness, and monitoring frameworks, the session provides leaders with a pragmatic path to advance fraud strategy with transparency, discipline, and measurable impact.

Key Takeaways

• Recognize how AI driven tools—deepfakes, synthetic identities, automated kits—are transforming fraud scale and complexity.
• Assess the role of voice, face, and behavioral biometrics within modern, risk based identity ecosystems.
• Integrate biometrics with device, network, and behavioral intelligence to elevate real time detection and prevention.
• Enhance investigations through biometric evidence handling and structured collaboration with law enforcement.
• Govern biometric programs with clear performance, privacy, and fairness controls that sustain trust and readiness.

A focused, strategic roadmap for assurance professionals: align identity defenses with evolving threats, operationalize biometrics with rigor, and strengthen organizational resilience in an AI accelerated fraud landscape.

In a landscape where audit, compliance, anti fraud, and assurance functions are rapidly exploring artificial intelligence, this session distills key findings from the recent global survey conducted by konaAI and Compliance Week on how today’s professionals across audit, compliance, and risk are adopting AI tools. Vincent Walden—CEO of konaAI and recognized leader in forensic analytics and continuous monitoring—translates these benchmark results into actionable insights for internal auditors, anti fraud professionals, compliance officers, assurance leaders, and risk practitioners alike.

Drawing from his work developing AI driven detection platforms, Vincent demonstrates how generative and agentic AI are reshaping core risk management workflows. Examples include continuous transaction scanning at enterprise scale, autonomous identification of anomalous vendor payments, and machine learning models capable of flagging high risk activity in real time—approaches already processing trillions in financial data and identifying hundreds of millions in suspicious transactions.

The session emphasizes practical adoption for multidisciplinary assurance teams: how to deploy AI tools with minimal capital investment, integrate them into existing monitoring programs, and build a compelling business case grounded in measurable ROI. Through concise demos and implementation frameworks, participants gain clarity on AI maturity levels and how to select the right technology for the right risk scenario, regardless of whether their vantage point is audit, compliance, fraud detection, anticorruption or enterprise assurance.

Key Takeaways:

• Benchmark AI maturity: Compare your audit, compliance, fraud risk, and assurance programs against global survey results.
• Applied use cases: See how AI accelerates fraud detection through continuous monitoring, anomaly scoring models, and automated review techniques.
• Choosing the right tool: Evaluate AI maturity levels—generative, machine learning, or autonomous agent technologies—and determine when each is most effective for audit, compliance, or fraud risk needs.
• Demonstrating ROI: Learn how to justify investment in anti fraud and compliance technologies through measurable efficiencies and risk reduction outcomes.

A concise, high impact session designed for audit, compliance, anti fraud / anticorruption and risk professionals seeking to move beyond AI theory into practical, ROI driven implementation—showing exactly how AI tools can strengthen fraud detection, streamline monitoring, and deliver enterprise value today.

Key Takeaways:

Artificial intelligence is transforming the fraud landscape at a pace that outstrips today’s control environments, oversight models, and assurance practices. As generative AI and autonomous agents become mainstream, fraudsters gain the ability to scale impersonation schemes, manipulate identities, and automate attacks with unprecedented speed and sophistication. The second half of this decade will not simply bring more fraud—it will bring new kinds of fraud that exploit AI’s capabilities.

We will explore how AI is reshaping fraud tactics and what this means for internal auditors charged with safeguarding organizational integrity. Drawing on lessons from federal programs, private-sector case studies, and emerging global trends, the talk highlights the shift from rule-based fraud controls to intelligence-driven monitoring. It makes the case that auditors must rethink how they assess risk, test controls, and provide assurance in an environment where threats evolve continuously.

Rather than diving into technical details, this session focuses on what auditors need to understand about AI-enabled fraud: the rise of hyper-realistic impersonations, synthetic identities, decision automation vulnerabilities, and the blurring line between insider threats and external actors. The presentation reframes fraud risk management as a strategic capability that internal audit must help shape through stronger analytics literacy, better data governance, and closer partnership with cybersecurity and program integrity teams.

Learning Objectives:

• Recognize how AI is transforming fraud schemes and expanding organizational exposure. Participants will understand the new fraud risks created by generative AI, automated attacks, and large-scale identity manipulation.
• Learn how internal audit can adapt fraud-focused risk assessment and control testing in an AI-driven environment. Participants will gain practical insights into updating methodologies to evaluate AI-augmented processes, automated decisioning, and intelligence-driven monitoring.
• Identify the capabilities internal audit must build to stay ahead of AI-enabled fraud. Participants will leave with a roadmap for enhancing fraud analytics literacy, strengthening data governance, and integrating audit work with cybersecurity, risk, and program integrity functions.

Criminal operations today exploit not just technological gaps but human vulnerabilities, applying intelligence service recruitment techniques to manipulate insiders across financial institutions. Drawing on Matthew Hedger’s 17 year career with CIA and NSA—where he operated undercover for over a decade inside transnational organized crime and cartel laundering pipelines—this session reveals how criminals identify stress, ego, isolation, or ambition to build trust and convert insiders into assets.

Although grounded in a banking example, the underlying dynamics apply directly to anti fraud, anti corruption, compliance, audit, assurance, and risk professionals across all sectors. Participants will examine how behavioral cues, social pattern shifts, and motivational triggers can reveal early compromise and how intelligence tradecraft can be adapted into practical monitoring frameworks.

By integrating real undercover scenarios and intelligence derived methodologies, this session equips leaders with a concise, actionable pathway to strengthen insider risk defenses. It underscores why behavioral intelligence—understanding motivations, pressures, and conduct shifts—must complement AML, cyber, audit, compliance, and assurance controls to build resilient cultures capable of detecting manipulation before it materializes.

Key Takeaways:

• Recognize recruitment tradecraft: Understand how intelligence style spotting, trust building, and moral compromise techniques are used to cultivate insiders across industries.
• Identify early behavioral indicators: Learn to detect subtle changes in demeanor, secrecy, outside contacts, and relational patterns that emerge before transactional red flags.
• Understand universal vulnerability factors: See how stress, ego appeal, isolation, or ambition create openings for insider manipulation in any organizational setting.
• Apply intelligence based safeguards: Translate recruitment cycles into practical behavioral risk frameworks that enhance anti fraud, anti corruption, audit, compliance, and assurance programs.
• Strengthen human centric defenses: Learn how integrating behavioral intelligence with technical controls can prevent infiltration and reinforce institutional integrity.

A concise, high level roadmap for assurance, compliance, anti fraud, audit, and risk leaders seeking to fortify insider risk resilience: understand the human playbook, detect compromise early, and intervene before criminal networks can move money or influence decisions.

Fraud has become one of the most significant risks for organizations due to its direct impact on financial results, institutional reputation, and public trust. The increasing complexity of business models, the digitization of processes, digital acceleration, and increasingly sophisticated fraud schemes have heightened the need to elevate the role of internal auditors and assurance professionals within institutions, empowering them to be allies in fraud prevention.

This presentation offers an executive overview of the Mexican regulatory framework applicable to fraud prevention in credit institutions, with an emphasis on the guidelines issued by the National Banking and Securities Commission (CNBV). It analyzes how these regulatory requirements can be translated into practical decisions regarding corporate governance, internal control, and risk management, going beyond mere regulatory compliance.

This course also addresses the role of internal audit as a key enabler for senior management and the board of directors, exploring the new capabilities, mindset, and tools the function requires to continue generating value for organizations. Finally, it explores how the regulatory principles of the financial sector can serve as a reference for designing fraud prevention programs in other industries to strengthen their control environment.

Key Learning Points:

• Understand the key elements of the Mexican regulatory framework for fraud prevention in credit institutions.
• Explore how to adapt financial sector prevention models to other industries.
• Skills required in internal audit teams for current and future risks.
• Recognize fraud as a strategic risk that must be managed by senior management and the board.

A high-value session that articulates solid criteria, informed and supported analysis, as well as a strategic vision enriched by the experience of one of the most recognized references in Internal Audit in the financial sector of Mexico and North America, to strengthen fraud prevention and consolidate professional capabilities in an environment of increasing risks.

Nearly half a century after its passage, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act stands at a crossroads with its moral authority questioned and its global influence uncertain. Not only has the Trump administration dramatically reduced resources dedicated to prosecuting corporations for overseas corruption, but it has narrowed the focus of the FCPA in light of the administration’s ‘America First’ foreign policy aims.

These developments have fundamentally altered the anti-corruption landscape and the regulatory risks faced by multinational corporations. The liberal, ‘rule of law’ based order that helped frame global anti-corruption efforts over the last thirty years has effectively ceased to function alongside increased geopolitical concerns and weaponized economic interdependence. From this perspective, some now view the FCPA simply as an extension of naked political interests by the United States rather than fulfilling the statute’s once loftier goals of lowering corruption abroad.

In this session, Severin Wirz, author of the book Bribery Beyond Borders: The Story of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, explores the shifting narratives that help explain the United States’ nearly fifty-year history of enforcing the world’s oldest cross-border anti-corruption law. Since its passage, the statute has remained a function of U.S. foreign policy, whether it’s been seeking to restore faith in democracy and free enterprise in the wake of Vietnam, helping to spread concepts of neo-liberalism and globalization in the post-Cold War era, or fighting terrorism in the post-9/11 era.

In particular, the session will cover:

• A brief history of the FCPA and what it teaches us about global inflections and anti-corruption efforts
• What to make of the first year of Trump 2.0 for the FCPA and its policy reset
• Specific emerging FCPA enforcement risks for companies operating in Mexio and other Latin American countries

A strategic reflection on the future of the FCPA in a geopolitical environment that is redefining, in real time, the risks, priorities and true scope of the global fight against fraud & corruption.

Employee and third-party tips reported through hotlines consistently rank as the most effective anti-fraud control globally, according to leading research such as the ACFE’s Report to the Nations. To maximize the impact of this critical mechanism within any integrity framework, organizations must go beyond mere implementation and cultivate a culture of psychological safety—where individuals feel confident to report concerns without fear of retaliation or stigma.

This session examines how trauma-informed principles—originally applied in justice and policing—can be leveraged to strengthen anti-corruption enforcement. Fear-based cultures often suppress reporting and perpetuate misconduct.

By contrast, trauma-informed approaches promote transparency, trust, and psychological safety, creating conditions where employees and stakeholders are empowered to speak up. Participants will gain insights into how these strategies can be embedded into compliance programs to reduce unethical behavior, reinforce organizational integrity, and drive sustainable cultural change.

Key Takeaways

• Understand the link between organizational culture and corruption risk: How fear-based environments suppress reporting and perpetuate misconduct.
• Learn practical trauma-informed strategies: Approaches that foster psychological safety, transparency, and trust within enforcement and compliance frameworks.
• Explore measurable benefits: How trauma-informed enforcement can reduce unethical behavior and strengthen integrity across organizations.

An essential session for leaders committed to advancing ethics hotlines and organizational integrity through evidence-based practices, cutting-edge psychological research, and proven methodologies designed for the challenges of the 21st century.

This session examines the rapid evolution of synthetic identity fraud and why it has become one of the most challenging and costly forms of fraud for organizations. As fraudsters increasingly blend real and fabricated data across multiple systems and institutions, traditional identity verification, access controls, and transaction monitoring processes are proving insufficient when applied in isolation.

This presentation explores how synthetic identity schemes operate across financial services, digital platforms, and interconnected third-party environments, with a focus on where governance, risk management, and internal controls break down. It highlights common red flags, control gaps, and investigative challenges, helping internal auditors understand why these frauds often remain undetected for extended periods, particularly in organizations with siloed data, limited external visibility, and fragmented ownership of identity risk.

The session concludes with practical, audit-relevant strategies to strengthen detection and prevention. These include risk-based control enhancements, more effective use of data and analytics, improved cross-functional coordination, and consortium-based approaches that allow organizations to share signals and insights across institutions. Emphasis is placed on how internal audit can assess the design and effectiveness of these strategies within existing governance and antifraud frameworks.

Key Takeaways

• Understand how synthetic identity fraud is evolving and why it is difficult to detect
• Recognize why traditional, organization-specific identity controls are falling short
• Identify key risk indicators and control weaknesses relevant to internal audit reviews
• Learn practical strategies, including consortium-based models, to improve detection and prevention
• Clarify the role of internal audit in evaluating and strengthening antifraud and identity risk frameworks

A session designed to strengthen professional judgment, enrich the internal audit function, and provide anti-fraud professionals with a more accurate and actionable understanding of one of today's most complex fraud schemes.

As AI becomes embedded in organizations, governance has lagged adoption, creating the risk that systems have been deployed without adequate oversight, accountability, and controls. This governance lag creates the potential for real harm, including biased or inaccurate outcomes, security vulnerabilities, and regulatory risk. Closing the gap between AI adoption and effective governance is therefore not optional but essential to ensuring responsible, transparent, and sustainable use of AI.

Drawing on Tina Kim’s exceptional leadership in statewide audits, public sector governance, and national AI standards bodies, the session distills how robust oversight can enable innovation while safeguarding organizational integrity.

With insights grounded in real audits, cross agency review work, and emerging regulatory expectations, the session provides a concise roadmap for leaders seeking to embed responsible AI into their governance frameworks, and explores how organizations can align AI adoption with effective governance that manages risk and sustains public trust.

By the end of this session, participants will be able to:

• Explain why AI governance matters and describe how governance reduces risk while enabling responsible innovation.
• Identify the core elements of AI governance (including key commonly used frameworks) and how to identify governance gaps.
• Understand what steps are necessary to operationalize AI governance and embed transparency, accountability, and oversight into AI-enabled operations.
• Develop a structured audit approach to assess AI governance to provide actionable recommendations.

A concise, strategic roadmap to close the AI governance gap: align innovation with oversight, embed accountability into every stage of the AI lifecycle, and build systems worthy of stakeholder trust.