Accounting Detectives
In a forensic accounting class that’s as much CSI as CPA, students serve as real-life investigators helping fraud victims
This story is part of “Appeal of the Real,” a series focused on highlighting the college of business and administration’s newfound commitment to experiential learning. For more, click here.
Alyssa Stokx, an accounting master’s student, remembers long nights that blurred into early mornings spent hunting for signs of fraud in a Milwaukee nonprofit organization’s files and ledgers. After hours of searching and speculating, she emailed her mentor, professional fraud investigator Tracy Coenen, Arts ’93, Grad ’96. “Could it be A or B?” Stokx asked, only to receive a brief reply: “I don’t know.”
As part of Stokx’s participation in the Department of Accounting’s Justice
for Fraud Victims Project, that struggle was part of a guided effort encouraging students to figure out clues on their own. Based on a program started at Gonzaga University and established at Marquette by Dr. Jodi Gissel, assistant professor of accounting, the project partners with the Milwaukee Police Department and the District Attorney’s of office to provide fraud examination services to small, local businesses and nonprofit organizations.
“There was more of a sense of responsibility on us. We had to step up.” — Alyssa Stokx.
With students at the helm and mentors such as Coenen providing the right amount of guidance and assistance, these active fraud investigations not only become valuable learning experiences; they frequently yield answers for the leaders of the organizations, and even prosecution of perpetrators of the fraud.
Though the process can be intimidating, it’s the open-ended nature and built-in complexity of these cases that make them so instructive. “It’s a natural phenomenon,” Gissel says of the need to “cope your way through complexity” in a profession that is part accounting and part detective work. “Not everything is going to be structured nicely for you.”
Gissel, Grad ’05, is passionate about the ways students can use skills and know-how acquired in the college to live out the Jesuit value of being men and women for and with others. The organizations that become project partners are too small to be able to afford a private fraud investigation, and MPD often has limited resources to provide the in-depth investigation of financial records necessary for the cases.
Their investigation complete, Stokx and her project partner presented their findings to representatives of the organization and law enforcement, along with recommended steps to help the organization prevent similar situations in the future. This time, those recommendations amounted to a crash course in segregation of duties — the best practices relating to who manages different aspects of an organization’s finances. The students’ findings were also turned over to the DA’s office, which is investigating further to determine whether to pursue prosecution.
“There was more of a sense of responsibility on us. If we didn’t do what we needed to, that would affect the organization as well,” Stokx says. “We had to step up.”
To learn more about career-altering experiences like Alysaa’s, read the stories of Thomas, Mason, and Charlie.
