A.B.C.'s of Behavioral Forensics: Applying Psychology to Financial Fraud Prevention and Detection

Preface: A Serendipitous Journey to This Book

The man who knows how will always have a job. The man who also knows why will always be his boss.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Advances are made by answering questions. Discoveries are made by questioning answers.

—Bernard Haisch Director, Calphysics Institute

Fraud, especially financial fraud, has become a global concern for governments and societies all over the world, and it shows no sign of abating. Instead, we remain largely helpless, watching what seems to be a growth industry. The United States has no monopoly on it, either. To try to explain this complex phenomenon is to set a grand goal, yet part of what our team set out to do was to follow Bernard Haisch's insight quoted in the epigraph to the preface and question answers. At the core is the answer that all fraud is greed and that the fraud of one mind is the same as the fraud of many minds.

This preface will have an autobiographical flavor to better describe how it is that such a team of authors came together to write this book—there's a story that runs through it. Genesis stories are important, as American philosopher George Santayana emphasized, for you can't know where you're going until you know where you've been.

Autobiographical narratives can be interesting, but mine (Sri speaking) is unusual because the luck element seems so compelling—including the serendipity in meeting Dr. David “ Daven ” E. Morrison III, a psychiatrist by training, who knows so many of my ex–Arthur Andersen ...