With Fiji’s apparent shortage of qualified forensic accountants, a plight reportedly shared by many Pacific island countries, training sessions to upgrade the skills within the workforce to cover cases from their own organisations may be our best bet.
One such short course in forensic accounting, and fraud and corruption investigation was conducted for the Pacific under the International Business and Economic Forum (IBEForuM) last week.
The training sessions supported by the International Academy of Business and Financial Management (IABFM) and the Institute of Internal Auditors Fiji (IIA Fiji) were facilitated by expert trainer with 25 years of experience, Simon Padgett.
“You’ve got an anti-corruption commission that’s doing the best it can, but they just don’t have the capacity, they don’t have the numbers of people to deal with the hundreds of cases that are coming in to them,” he said.
Mr Padgett said he’d been following relevant cases in Fiji through the national newspapers and was glad to provide what assistance he could.
“It just takes resources and skill sets to get a grip on this. So, what Fiji is doing, from what I can see, is it’s gearing up, it’s training its people in audit, it’s people in risk, and it’s leaders to take on the role and do this.”
Thirty-five delegates, many of them heads of audit, finance, risk management, or CEOs and leaders of organisations from Fiji and the surrounding islands attended the three-day course covering all aspects of fraud and corruption, from traditional fraud schemes such as money laundering, asset theft, payroll fraud, to trends like electronic fraud and the use of AI (artificial intelligence) for fraudulent schemes.
“All we can do is train as many people as possible.
“We’ve got a good group of 35 here and they’re all going back updated and ready to implement fraud investigations and prevention into their auditing programs and into their risk management techniques.”
The training sessions were held from August 2-4 at the Grand Pacific Hotel in Suva.
The involved organisations are reportedly considering further sessions for later this year.
