CIPFM NEWSLETTER

Special Christmas Editionissue 4

In this issueNew dawn, our 2017 journeypge 1

Forensic Accounting explainedContinued from last issue

pge 4

Introducing Communi-cation Skills Centerpge 2

New dawn, our 2017 journey

The year 2017 was a defining year for Chartered Institute of Professional Financial Manag-ers (CIPFM) and saw us going through many transformations that had a very positive im-pact on us as an organisation.

These changes include many initiatives that were put in place in a bid to improve our brand and our services.

At the beginning of 2017, CIP-FM saw a change in manage-ment. It is one of the few compa-nies today to have a young and female Chief executive Officer, Miss Talent Kadzima, a devel-opment which wouldn’t have been possible 10 years back, we are grateful to our government for the gender policy which speaks of women inclusivity in top management positions.

Miss Talent Kadzima looks up to 2 great motivating Drs who oc-cupy the positions of president and chairperson i.e Hon Dr Paul Kadzima and Dr Chenjerai Cho-

vava, but above all she is backed by a team of young and vibrant people who are still eager to learn and very passionate about seeing CIPFM going forward.

Marking a new era and a dawn of positivity, at the beginning of the year, CIPFM changed offic-es from Bluffhill to Greendale Msasa. These offices are more conducive and the environment better than the previous. This was all in a bid to rebrand our-selves and give ourselves a new

image, a new positive image.

As an institution full of young blood, growth is one of our aims and we are still hungry for expansion. Therefore this year, a new short course was introduced, security forensics and loss control management.

The modern man puts more value in modern day property such as intellectual property; unfortunately this also creates a modern criminal in a mod-ern world. As a result, Forensic investigations and Loss Con-trol management have also be-come popular across the globe.

As a result, CIPFM noted there is need to upgrade the general knowledge of the ordinary/com-mon security officer, or even the ordinary person who wishes to protect their property, to levels where they are aware of the mod-ern-day crime – that is, WHAT it is, HOW it’s done and how to PREVENT and/or REDUCE it.

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CIPFM has taken the opportu-nity to spearhead the upgrading of the modern security guards and officers in Zimbabwe in order to make them not just more relevant but increase their knowledge and skills to far be-yond that of the modern-day criminal. Thus, the introduc-tion of the short course in Se-curity Forensics and Loss Con-trol Management, which equips learners with the necessary knowledge to help them tackle the 21st century type of security and loss prevention and control.

In a bid to keep our students in touch with what is happening at CIPFM, that is new devel-opments and all, CIPFM intro-duced a newsletter. This news-letter is a monthly publication that will comprise of different issues ranging from our activ-ities to explaining our services.

We are also going to use this newsletter for our clients, that is they will be able to advertise in it free of charge, and in addition any of our students is free to make his/her contributions in it.

After noticing that our stu-dents were facing challenges in terms of assignment and the-sis writing, a new department was introduced to help address that challenge. Communication Skills Center was established to help the students with academic writing as well as their research. This center will make a huge dif-ference in terms of how our stu-dents present their work and ex-press themselves in assignments.

Introducing CIPFM Communication Skills Center

After noticing that some Chartered Institute of Professional Finan-cial Managers (CIPFM) are facing challenges when it comes to writ-ing their assignments, the depart-ment of Communication Skills was established in November 2017.

In today’s competitive world, com-munication skills in business are the most sought after quality of an educated person. Reading, writing and listening carefully are the three most important communication skills for students. These skills like most of the communication skills sounds too familiar as a result of which we take them for granted.

This has been introduced in schools and colleges for the over-all development of students, thus the introduction of these skills at CIPFM emphasising on issues of plagiarism, referencing and use of some unreliable and unprofession-al sources such as Wikipedia.

This department is also putting em-phasis on proper academic writing meaning the student’s work should be easier to read and understand that is the message communicated should be clear to the reader.

Academic writing covers many ar-eas that CIPFM students should be familiar with, which include pay-ing

particular attention to grammar, spellings, tenses and punctuation; this makes the assignments more readable and easy to understand.

Communication skills center is also there to assist students with their thesis writing i.e when they are doing their final projects they will know the structure to follow which will be easy for them.Also having realised that referenc-ing can be time consuming and boring yet it is a very important as-pect of academic writing, different softwares have been created to help learners in referencing, instead of doing it manually they can do it automatically.

The communication skills center is also there to guide students when they are writing, they can easily asses themselves even before the tutor has marked their work, they can easily tell the range of the level of their marks because it clarifies the marking criteria of written as-signments.

As CIPFM we hope the introduc-tion of this new department will take us a long way and most im-portantly it will help our students not only in their academic life but in their workplaces, homes and the world at large.

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The main steps in forensic analyt-ics are (a) data collection, (b) data preparation, (c) data analysis, and (d) reporting. For example, foren-sic analytics may be used to review an employee’s purchasing card ac-tivity to assess whether any of the purchases were diverted or divert-ible for personal use.

Forensic accountants, investigative accountants or expert accountants may be involved in recovering pro-ceeds of serious crime and in re-lation to confiscation proceedings concerning actual or assumed pro-ceeds of crime or money launder-ing. In the United Kingdom, rele-vant legislation is contained in the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002.

Several instances of corporate scandals and failure in the recent past have put the professional ac-counting bodies into a new per-ception that goes beyond the tra-ditional statutory audit. There is need to respond to this changing criminal threat and the skills of non traditional investigators like the accountant and legal experts are needed to combat the corporate ill, this has increased the quest for the services of the forensic accoun-tant (Uche, 2009; Mojeed, 2007).

In Zimbabwe, the Zimbabwe Rev-enue Authority (Zimra) has re-vealed endemic corruption, viola-tion of Government laws and poor corporate governance among other shenanigans through the services of forensic accountants and fraud examiners that resulted in the sus-pension and firing of Commission-er-General Mr Gershem Pasi and five other executives. Also the World Bank ex vice pres-ident Oby Ezekwesili observed that an estimated $400 billion U S

dollars of Nigeria’s oil revenue was stolen or misspent since indepen-dence in 1960 (The Citizen, 2014). The immediate past governor of Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Lamido Sanusi stated that 3380 cases of fraud involving N17.97bil-lion was reported in 2012 while 2352 cases involving N28.40 bil-lion was reported in 2011 in Nige-rian banks (CBN, 2013). Crumbley (2009) noted that no matter how optimistic we aim to be about the future, the recession has given birth to more criminalists than ever with many more frauds yet to be discovered. In his words, “just like termites, fraud never sleeps; just like termites, fraud can destroy the foundation of a busi-ness”.

Forensic accounting and fraud in-vestigation methodologies are dif-ferent than internal auditing. Thus forensic accounting services and practice should be handled by fo-rensic accounting experts, not by internal auditing experts.

Forensic accountants may appear on the crime scene a little later than fraud auditors, but their ma-jor contribution is in translating complex financial transactions and numerical data into terms that or-dinary laypersons can understand.

That is necessary because if the fraud comes to trial, the jury will be made up of ordinary laypersons. On the other hand, internal audi-tors move on checklists that may not surface the evidence that the jury or regulatory bodies look for. The fieldwork may carry out legal risks if internal auditing checklists are employed instead asking to a forensic accountant and may re-sult serious consultant malpractice

risks.

Forensic accountants utilize an understanding of economic theo-ries, business information, finan-cial reporting systems, account-ing and auditing standards and procedures, data management & electronic discovery, data analy-sis techniques for fraud detection, evidence gathering and investiga-tive techniques, and litigation pro-cesses and procedures to perform their work. Forensic accountants are also increasingly playing more proactive risk reduction roles by designing and performing extend-ed procedures as part of the stat-utory audit, acting as advisers to audit committees, fraud deterrence engagements, and assisting in in-vestment analyst research.

In conclusion, being a forensic accountant or fraud examiner re-quires professional possession of multidisciplinary backgrounds and skills and knowledge to com-prehend the trajectories of inter-national crimes and fraud. In this respect, traditional accountants are both conceptually and profession-ally ill-equipped to deal with com-plex fraud, financial crimes, oc-cupational abuse and corruption. This has induced the growing need for specialized skills in forensic ac-counting and fraud investigation in this 21st century of globaliza-tion, electronic commerce and the internet

Through training by the Chartered Institute of Professional Financial Managers that offers forensic ac-counting and fraud examinations courses.. In fact, many countries have seen the need and profession-al bodies for forensic accounting have been set.

Forensic accounting explainedContinuing from issue 3

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