The Center for Internal Auditing Excellence at the Naveen Jindal School of Management again hosted its annual premier event, the Fraud Summit, virtually this year because of the global pandemic.

The 16th Annual Fraud Summit, held March 25 and 26, continued the 2020 theme of whistleblowing and featured Elin Kunz, a former compliance officer at Halifax Health Systems who helped put a stop to $86 million in Medicare fraud at the Florida-based company.

Twenty years into a career at Halifax Health, Kunz was director of Physician Services when she uncovered questionable physician compensation and unnecessary surgeries. She filed a lawsuit on behalf of the government under the federal False Claims Act and was later joined in the successful lawsuit by the U.S. Department of Justice.

The summit also included a keynote session with Dave Lieber, “The Watchdog” columnist for The Dallas Morning News. A consumer advocate and investigative reporter, Lieber scored first place in the 2019 National Society of Newspaper Columnists Column-Writing Contest.

Lieber’s website says: “He fights for Americans and shows them how to save time, money and aggravation. He works to expose corruption and make positive change.”

Other top speakers included:

• Steve Dawson, a Certified Fraud Examiner and Certified Public Accountant, whose company, the Dawson Forensic Group, has worked with the FBI, the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and other federal and state agencies.
• Rick Roybal, a Certified Fraud Examiner experienced in the oil and gas industry and an expert in vendor due diligence.
• Justus Ekeigwe, a Certified Information Systems Auditor and Certified Information Security Manager who oversees technology risk management at Charles Schwab.

The 15th Annual Fraud Summit, held virtually last summer, attracted an audience of more than 1,000 internal auditors and fraud examiners and focused on the plight of whistleblowers in the age of fraud. Keynote speakers included journalist Tom Mueller, author of Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in an Age of Fraud (New York: Riverhead Books, 2019). Mueller explored “the nature of the whistleblowing act” and profiled insiders who have exposed fraud in America’s public and private institutions.

A Conference Experience in a Virtual Space

Joseph Mauriello, Center for Internal Auditing Excellence director, sought to replicate the conference environment in the virtual space. “We wanted our conference attendees to not only benefit from the outstanding content that we offer at our event,” he said, “but to also share in the conference experience of interacting with each other and our sponsoring firms.”

To that end, the 2020 and 2021 summits incorporated virtual sponsor booths and video capabilities so that sponsors, speakers and attendees could interact.

And, as usual, both summits offered continuing professional education credits to attendees for workshops in advance of the conference and for the conference itself.

Academically, the Center for Internal Auditing Excellence oversees the Jindal School’s Internal Auditing Education Partnership, which offers students a strong program in internal audit and risk management through accounting and information management courses.

The center puts on the Annual Fraud Summit in conjunction with the Dallas Chapter of the Institute of Internal Auditors, and proceeds benefit center students.