{"id":16247,"date":"2001-09-02T06:00:47","date_gmt":"2001-09-02T11:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/?p=16247"},"modified":"2019-04-27T22:23:18","modified_gmt":"2019-04-28T03:23:18","slug":"private-eye-forensic-accountant-dissects-financial-problems-for-clients","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/private-eye-forensic-accountant-dissects-financial-problems-for-clients\/","title":{"rendered":"Private Eye: Forensic Accountant Dissects Financial Problems for Clients"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Small Business Times<\/strong><\/em>
\nBy Susan Nord<\/p>\n

Tracy Coenen doesn\u2019t view herself as conventional. \u201cI have a quirky personality,\u201d Coenen says of herself. \u201cAnd for those people that have known me a long time, they all say, \u2018You know, I always knew you\u2019d do something a little bit off the beaten path.’\u201d<\/p>\n

Off the beaten path in this case is forensic accounting. Most people that meet her at networking functions see her name tag and say, \u201c\u2018Forensic accounting. That sounds interesting. What is it?’\u201d Coenen says.<\/p>\n

\"\"In fact, one of her clients dubbed her the \u201cQuincy\u201d of accounting, referring to the Jack Klugman TV series about a pathologist who solved crimes using clues from the dead bodies he examined. Like Klugman\u2019s character, clients call on Coenen\u2019s unique combination of skills to investigate accounting-related claims.<\/p>\n

Coenen studied criminology at Marquette University and after taking a course in white-collar crime was intrigued with business crime. She was advised to take accounting courses and found that the combination of criminology and accounting suited her. She took enough accounting classes to minor in it.<\/p>\n

After graduation, she worked as a probation officer but was looking for a field that combined accounting and crime. She went back to Marquette for a master\u2019s degree and took enough accounting courses to qualify to sit for the certified public accountant exam.<\/p>\n

While exploring her next career move, she found out that Arthur Andersen, one of the Big Five accounting firms, had a litigation support group in its Chicago and New York offices. Unwilling to move to Chicago, she thought she could work on cases under the guidance of the Chicago office. But the work was infrequent at best and after grinding through several busy seasons in both audit and tax, she contacted headhunters, describing her ideal job, not knowing if it really existed.<\/p>\n

As luck would have it, one of the recruiters attended a seminar featuring a speaker who was an accountant that did investigative work. The headhunter called, and even though the firm he worked for had no openings, the investigative accountant interviewed Coenen.<\/p>\n

It was her dream job.<\/p>\n

She worked with the Milwaukee firm for two years learning the trade under the guidance of an accountant with more than 20 years\u2019 experience in the trade.<\/p>\n

\u201cForensic accounting is something that you only learn by doing,\u201d Coenen says. \u201cYou can\u2019t learn it in school; you have to get experience with cases.\u201d<\/p>\n

With enough case experience under her belt, Coenen quit to begin her own firm in January 2000. She had a handful of clients that she had built a good working relationship through her former employer, but was cognizant of the fact that she didn\u2019t want to steal clients.<\/p>\n

But some of those clients, impressed with her work, decided to use both firms for projects. One such client was Northwestern Mutual\u2019s disability income insurance division. The company uses forensic accountants to investigate claims by some policyholders to verify that their disability does, in fact, qualify for payments under the terms of the policy. Many are high-income, self-employed individuals such as doctors, dentists, and attorneys.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe did a good, thorough job (with the former employer) and showed good qualities,\u201d says Tom Mattocks, senior disability financial consultant at Northwestern. \u201cShe\u2019s the type of individual that we think can go out and represent us when we need to do a detailed forensic audit.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to Mattocks, Northwestern has used Big Five accounting firms, but the results weren\u2019t exactly what the company was looking for. \u201cThe public accountants tend to focus more on GAAP (Generally Accepted Auditing Principles), which is their job,\u201d Mattocks explained. \u201cIt just seems to me that forensic accountants do this kind of work day after day and because of that they\u2019re going to be much better at it than someone who maybe does one assignment per month for two days.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s exactly the kind of niche that Coenen is establishing for herself. She also does extensive work in contract litigation and employee theft investigations. In those areas, she is usually called upon to assess the damages caused by theft or from violated contracts.<\/p>\n

Establishing herself as an expert in the field has taken time. \u201cAttorneys don\u2019t go to the Yellow Pages and look for an expert witness,\u201d Coenen says. \u201cThey don\u2019t look in the newspaper looking for an expert witness. It\u2019s a very long, trust-building process and there\u2019s a really long lead time on it between meeting an attorney, building a relationship, and getting them to trust you with even a small case. And I don\u2019t blame them because they\u2019ve got a case, and they\u2019ve got one shot at making that case right, and if their expert comes in and screws it up, they don\u2019t get a re-do in court.\u201d<\/p>\n

Coenen said it took her a while to become comfortable with networking and establishing those relationships, but it seems to be paying off. \u201cWhen I go to these groups, I\u2019m not necessarily meeting the attorneys or the business owners who need me, but I\u2019m meeting someone who knows someone who might need me,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

One of the attorneys she has met through networking is Peter Richardson of Michael, Best & Freidrich. He sees a tremendous upside for Coenen\u2019s practice. \u201cA lot of it is skill and competency and a lot of it is having the ability to communicate,\u201d Richardson says of forensic accounting, \u201cand I think Tracy has those things.\u201d<\/p>\n

Richardson adds that Coenen\u2019s \u201ccombination of criminology, being a certified public accountant and having an MBA are what separates her from the pack.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are a lot of experts who are just accountants,\u201d Richardson said.\u201dAnd damages experts have to be much more than accountants because what they have to do is testify about causation of lost profits in the marketplace, which involves assessing demand.\u201d<\/p>\n

Highly organized, as any successful one-woman firm would be, Coenen has no thoughts of adding additional accountants to her firm in the near future.<\/p>\n

\u201cI like being a one-woman show,\u201d she says. \u201cMy clients know the quality of work I do. I know what results I get, and they get to know that when they\u2019re hiring my company, they\u2019re hiring me, and it\u2019s not being passed off on somebody who may or may not give the quality of work that I do.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes people say, \u2018It\u2019s only you?\u2019 I see a benefit to that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Small Business Times By Susan Nord Tracy Coenen doesn\u2019t view herself as conventional. \u201cI have a quirky personality,\u201d Coenen says of herself. \u201cAnd for those people that have known me a long time, they all say, \u2018You know, I always […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2777,2778],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-forensic-accountant","category-media-profiles"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Z0e-4e3","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16247"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16247\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}