There are really two aspects. One would be through policing and public policy, and the other is what individuals or companies should do.
Just from the policing and public policy side, we've talked a little bit about that, but forensic accountants right now, I would say, are normally used by police forces for two things. One is if they need specific expertise they'll bring someone in, but most of the time they're trying to hire people who are given tasks to do. You are given a task to do for the police force, and it's quite often a low-level person who comes in on a secondment or as a government employee working as a forensic accountant. There's not a lot of strategic involvement of forensic accountants in policing, and if you look at the structure and the culture of policing, it is one of “we are the police force and you are a civilian”, and it's not really as strong a team as it could be.
I've had some discussions with people in fraud units and what not, and it's tough from a finance perspective to get senior-level forensic accountants in to assist in that area. It is an area that I think could be improved, if there were more brainstorming and strategic involvement of the financial people as well as the police, because we each do our jobs very well, but it's hard to get us to always work together. So that would be one area you could look at, to see if there is a way to have more forensic accountant involvement at a higher level in the police area.
On the individual side, that's a broad question. How do we defend ourselves against this? We've done investigations with the union, for example, where surveillance was taken of a senior person meeting with three different organized crime families. The set-up internally was not designed to investigate that. If you're a local union, you're breaching the constitution to investigate it. If you're a member of the union, it's very hard to figure out a way to deal with that. I'm not sure how you interest policing in something like a union or areas outside of the norm, like drugs, smuggling, or white collar crime, where potentially organized crime is getting an influence. It depends on the area.
I'll stop there. That's probably a good place to stop.