Lyn Cameron, CFE, LL.B, is the senior director leading Microsoft’s Financial Integrity Unit, and recently, she was elected to the ACFE's Board of Regents. In the most recent episode of Fraud Talk, the ACFE’s monthly podcast, Cameron shares advice on what it takes to build a fulfilling career, oversee case management for complex fraud investigations and manage a team that's spread out all over the world.

Below is an excerpt from the full transcript, where Cameron discusses case management and how to adapt when your team gets knocked off course. Download the full transcript in PDF form or listen to the episode at the bottom of this post.

Courtney: We're going to do a hypothetical situation. Let's say you've got your case management. It's swimming along just fine. Everything's going great, but then something big comes in and just knocks you completely off course. How would you and your team adapt to something like that?

Lyn: That's a really important point. My team is located all around the world. They're in Redmond, Asia, the Middle East, Europe. In the most part, they're geography focused. They're focused on their regions, but we're a global team and we prioritize things based on risk. I have a central team that has the intake and does some preliminary steps and assessment. If something big came in, and I deemed it to be the priority of the company, I'd work out which people in my team around the world are best suited for this particular investigation, and the highest risk, highest priority gets the resources.

Now that has a positive and a negative effect. You've really got to be very critical when you think about what is high risk, high priority. Sometimes the sky's falling for a lot of people. Something that might be urgent today, a couple of steps taken then releases the pressure valve on it and we can get back to businesses as usual. The flip side of that is, if everything new and shiny comes in as high risk and high priority, you've got cases that are real cases that have real impacts that are sitting there and not being dealt with. The longer that they sit there, the worse it is for the employee experience, the risk for the company, and it then becomes a higher priority by virtue of how old it is.

Aging is a real thing that you really have to focus on, and it's those run-of-the-mill things that don't get as much attention, and you actually have to make a conscious effort to put attention to them. We will deal with high risk as the No. 1 priority, and we'll put the right resources on it and we’re constantly adjusting and tweaking. We also run a process within our team, working with the lawyers, where we’re meeting very regularly and going through the dockets and working out what's sitting, what shouldn't be sitting, what's got some obstacles that we need to remove.

Courtney: Age would play a pretty big factor on deciding, "This one, well it's been here for a while now so we need to move with that.”

Lyn: Yes. It's a really tricky thing to deal with because there's a lot of different elements. Of course, if it's something big and major and high risk, you’ve got to go to that first. Every person who raises a concern or escalates an issue, the company has to do something about it. We owe it to them. We want to have a speak-up culture. Any company would want to have a speak-up culture. You're going to diminish that if you don't take action to validate people's concerns. Aging is probably one of the things that we get the most criticism for. We can't go and explain to everyone, "Well, we had this big case here,” and things like that. But we have to really work hard at focusing on those things.

I do some aging analysis on cases. We've identified that the ones that are just a little bit trickier than a quick hit but not rising to a high-risk manner, they're the ones that tend to be put aside more readily. We have to have a concerted effort. What can we do? Sometimes those are the cases that we will move around to somebody who has bandwidth or somebody else who has…We have all different skills in the team. Some people can get through things very, very quickly, while still doing a professional job and not cutting corners and are more suited to perhaps getting rid of some of those age cases. When I say getting rid of them…doing the work so that the company can make an informed business decision on the outcome.