“No entity is immune from fraud. Fraud indiscriminately affects all types of organizations regardless of sector, size, or geographical location. It does not distinguish between public or private entities, by what they do, by their environmental footprint, by their level of sustainability, by their public profile, or by the number of years they have been in existence. It is not softhearted: Non-profits or charitable entities are potentially just as vulnerable as those focused on making profits. They may, in fact, be more vulnerable because they may not be able to afford more sophisticated controls, or can not afford to allocate sufficient resources to fraud prevention and detection.”
Fraud Prevention and Detection: Warning Signs and the Red Flag System by Rodney T Stamler, Hans J. Marschdorf & Mario Possamai
Successful financial investigations reflect a strategy wherein the human element of the alleged perpetrator is equally as important as accounting for numbers. Essential components for moulding an effective financial investigative strategy are based on judgement, intuition, and specialty knowledge in criminalistics and information technology. Mr. Marschdorf has provided legal counsel and corporate clients with this investigative capacity from more than 20 years of practical financial case experience.
As a former leader of a cross-continental European investigations practice within a “Big 4” professional services firm, Mr. Marschdorf also provides the “Big 4” large case management experience without the potential conflict issues.
As a boutique firm operation, Marschdorf Forensics provides its services without having to be concerned about information loss from delegation to inexperienced staff, a phenomenon often observed in forensic practices of big professional services firms. When needed, we partner with hand-picked experienced practitioners in Europe and North America. Solving a fraud case is often easy. Proving the solution beyond reasonable doubt in criminal courts or on a balance of probabilities in civil proceedings is the true challenge.
His leadership experience includes managing a large investigations practice across countries in Europe and managing complex cases with interdisciplinary teams.
Mr. Marschdorf holds a PhD in Business Administration from the University of Cologne. As Chartered Accountant admitted in Germany, he can practice in the European Union and Switzerland. He also holds the professional designations “Certified Fraud Examiner” in the United States and “Chartered Director” in Canada. He serves as Vice Chairman on the Advisory Board to a Berlin MBA program of the Steinbeis Hochschule, School of Governance Risk and Compliance, for which he is also a member of the faculty.
When a suspicion of fraud surfaces, Marschdorf Forensics can conduct internal investigations or support your existing resources such as your internal audit department in their investigative efforts by guiding and leading their teams. Counsels representing victims of fraud may find themselves in need of evaluating large numbers of documentary evidence. The dynamics of a fraud scheme can often be reconstructed from correspondence, in particular email correspondence or account statements including supporting documents. Correspondence often speaks through more than the mere facts expressed in a document. The frequency of correspondence between specific players, the tone of their communication often displays the nature of relationships. Sometimes, what is not being said can be more revealing than what is being said. This being said, we crunch the numbers, too, using database and spreadsheet software and working with client’s discovery management software such as “Recommind” or “Summation”.
The sheer size of materials to evaluate in some cases can make it unavoidable to engage big professional service firms. The delegation structure regularly applied within the big firm environment often means that the one or two experienced individuals on such an investigation cannot immerse themselves sufficiently in an investigation. Marschdorf and his experienced colleagues can insert themselves into investigation teams of large firms, providing the grey hair experience required to successfully bringing together the evidence to make a case.
Expert testimony is a challenging, often daunting mandate. Giving testimony means that the expert has to have a grasp of every piece of evidence supporting or contradicting charges or claims, even those, which only seem to serve such purpose and the ability to understand the big picture. Often, investigators are barred from testifying due to bias considerations or are unable to testify, because, due to extensive delegation, they do not have enough understanding of case details to survive cross-examination. Sometimes, the issue is as simple as the courts not accepting foreign country qualifications as credentials.
In the past, Marschdorf has been admitted as expert witness and testified in the United States, Canada and several European jurisdictions, in criminal courts as well as civil courts, in cases charging money laundering, senior management fraud, bribery and procurement fraud.
Together with the School of Governance Risk and Compliance of the Steinbeis Hochschule, in Berlin, Germany, Marschdorf Forensics offers Compliance Risk Assessments based on a proprietary model developed at this University. The model allows compliance risk assessment not only in a binary mode (compliant/non compliant), but allows for gradual differentiations. The model also gives tailored directions how to improve an existing status of non-compliance risks with specific measures by evaluating quality and completeness of compliance risk management processes.
The Attorney General of a country commonly referred to as a tax haven country had received a mutual legal assistance request from a foreign country. The prime minister of that country had allegedly accepted bribes from a well-known businessman in that country.
Read MoreA consortium of banks had been party to financial reorganisation negotiations with one of the Big 10 European construction enterprises headquartered in Vienna, Austria. They had acquired Eastern European construction companies and substantial real estate…
Read MoreAfter a large publicly traded manufacturer of turnkey cement factories filed for creditor protection, the situation had manipulated financial statements written all over it. Unfinished projects inventories had to be written down by the equivalent of 400 million dollars from ...
Read MoreA financial services partnership with offices in several European financial centers was harboring suspicions that one of their senior partners was servicing a wealthy client without billing his fees through the partnership. The physical and electronic files regarding the sus...
Read MoreDuring the course of the so-called financial crisis, between 2008 and 2010, many communities across the globe found themselves owning Collateral Debt Obligations in default, despite the fact that they were regulated by laws or governance structures not to invest in such stru...
Read MoreA Private Equity Investment Fund had acquired a seemingly successful Marketing Agency from its sole proprietor. Successful they were, but how did they reach this success? One of the Big 4 accounting firms had conducted a due diligence review prior to the acquisition and noti...
Read MoreAs a member of the faculty of the School of Governance, Risk and Compliance at the Steinbeis Hochschule, a private university in Berlin, Germany, Marschdorf teaches fraud examination, corporate governance, enterprise risk management and compliance risk management… ...
Read MoreMarschdorf, together with former senior RCMP officer Rodney Stamler and senior investigator at one of Canada’s Big 5 banks, Mario Possamai. co-wrote this book. It will be published by U.S. publisher Taylor & Francis in in March 2014. The book is about early warning si...
Read MoreIn this 2008 contribution to the omnibus publication initiated by Raimund Röhrich from Frankfurt, Germany, Hans Marschdorf takes a macroeconomic view on the impact of prosecuting foreign corrupt practices on the development of international trade.
Read MoreIn this 1999 contribution to the omnibus publication initiated by Prof. Mark Pieth, then President of the OECD Commission on Bribery and Corruption and Prof. Peter Eigen, then President of Transparency International, titled “Corruption in International Business”, ...
Read MoreThis article was published in German language in a professional magazine named “Deutsches Steuerrecht”. Marschdorf provided a road map long before Sarbanes and Oxley, what a financial year-end audit can do about uncovering fraud. The article discusses how year-end audit...
Read MoreMarschdorf’s doctorate thesis was published as a book in 1984. This book was one of the early German publications on economic analysis of bankruptcy law. It was written and published during a period when Germany’s bankruptcy laws were about to undergo a complete revision...
Read MoreFor four decades, Bob Lindquist has conducted financial investigations in a variety of domestic and international businesses and matters serving the public interest. His investigations have taken him to far-flung locations such as China, the Caribbean, Europe, South America ...
Read MoreThe proprietor of this boutique investigations firm, Ms. Birgit Galley, has conducted forensic accounting investigations for close to twenty years. She started her career in post-wall Berlin working on mandates in connection with privatizations of companies in what was forme...
Read MoreThe proprietor of this investigations firm, Mr. Javier Sarmiento, is a CPA with sixteen years of experience in Forensic Accounting and Litigation Support. He started his career working for a national firm specializing in forensic accounting and insurance loss accounting. He ...
Read MoreWilliam Lozada is a CPA with 26 years of experience in Forensic Accounting and Litigation Support. He started his career working for a national firm specializing in damage quantification assessments. After ten years, he moved on to work as Senior Manager for a Big 4 accounti...
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