forensic accountant

Forensic Accountants and the Private Investigator License

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magnifyprintRecently the AICPA published an article on its Journal of Accountancy website regarding private investigator licensing rules across the country. There is a concern that forensic accountants may be subject to private investigator regulations since they are doing investigative work. The AICPA has drafted a grid outlining the regulations by state, but you should do further research on your own because it does not tell the whole story.

The grid provides the following information on private investigators in Wisconsin:

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Do Former Law Enforcement Officers Make Better Forensic Accountants?

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Today Brian Willingham of the Diligentia Group has inspired me with his article Do Former Law Enforcement Officers Make Better Private Investigators? While Brian agrees that experience in law enforcement can be helpful to a private investigator, it does not necessarily make that investigator better. The same can be said for forensic accountants and fraud investigators: Law enforcement experience can be helpful, but it is not as important as you might believe.

Brian points us to a video that suggests that:

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For Students and Job Seekers: Becoming a Fraud Investigator

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I routinely get emails from students, job seekers, or the gainfully employed who want to make a career change… all asking me for advice on getting into the field of forensic accounting and fraud investigation.

Here are my top three tips for getting into this field:

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Patrick Byrne: Do As I Say, Not As I Do.

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Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock.com (NASDAQ:OSTK) has been on a crusade against naked short selling for a couple of years (or more?). It is currently his position that naked short selling is bad. He confirms his belief in this statement on Overstock.com:

Patrick Byrne is waging a fight with Wall Street over naked short selling. He believes that, through the practice of naked shorting, Wall Street is cheating Main Street America and destroying small companies for a profit. Byrne feels that the SEC is failing to protect retail investors and small companies because it has been captured by Wall Street, and that the New York financial press is similarly co-opted. Byrne believes that the SEC’s efforts to eliminate this abusive practice are falling short, not simply for Overstock (which has itself been on the Regulation SHO Threshold list for over two years), but in a way that creates the possibility of systemic risk for our financial world.

So naked short selling is an “abusive practice”? (Notice that there are no qualifiers in the statement above. It simply says that naked shorting is bad.)

Read morePatrick Byrne: Do As I Say, Not As I Do.