Forensics: Reactive compliance and internal investigations

I started my career almost 22 years ago, because I was the only one who spoke English in the firm where I worked, one of the Big Four, where I worked for many years. It turned out that they needed someone who spoke English for a project with some Americans in my hometown, in Guayaquil, Ecuador. The person who came to me for these professional matters is an American woman whom I love and esteem very much. She saw potential in me and began to mentor me and teach me everything related to forensics. It was a spectacular opportunity, I am passionate about the subject, apart from being a speciality of curiosity, of knowing how to put together a puzzle and knowing how to go after the clues, to know and go after the evidence. It involves technological work, which consists of gathering information, analysing the information, etc.

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What mindset is required to do forensic? It represents the certainty of having the root cause for internal problems or internal allegations or complaints that are received of whatever nature. So we always look to go after the root cause, to go after the evidence and present it to the compliance officer, the compliance officer and then to the trial lawyers, and this is the hard part, which you can rely on depending on the legal strategy, or the compliance strategy. 

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The word forensic is most probably associated with death or death, because of how serious it is. But let's imagine that it is a company or a person who has suffered an accident, who is bleeding and that you are the doctor who is going to go to cure and give him the remedy; to understand what happened and how it is going to be shaped and remedied, that is your Compliance programme. That is why at F&C Consulting Group we look for both the reactive part, which is the forensic part, and the preventive part, which is the Compliance part. This goes hand in hand, it is concatenated and makes a perfect match, right?

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Yes, indeed, the truth is that it's about being in the right place at the right time, a bit like what happened to you at the beginning.

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Yes, the truth is that it's about being at the right time, that's the word. The good thing is that you are taken into account when something happens, that's our speciality, that's what we focus on. The reactive part indeed adds a lot of value to any compliance programme. In fact, investigations are what you have to do in a compliance programme. And that is where we come in, where forensic comes in.