Chapter Leaders Meet at ACFE Global Fraud Conference

I was happy to attend my first Chapter Leaders Meeting and meet close to 80 leaders from around the world on Sunday, June 12, at the 27th Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference. I was excited to hear about the issues that most affect the chapters and the solutions provided to help make your chapters succeed.

Ryan Hubbs, CFE, President of the Houston Area Chapter, kicked off the meeting discussing the successes of the past year. Several chapters set attendance records at their events, many of whom partnered with other organizations to subsidize the cost of holding the event and increase membership opportunities. He discussed the importance of organizing your paperwork and filing it in a timely manner. 

He also discussed chapter setbacks which included a few chapter websites being hacked, contingency planning when you lose board members, and having back up plans if and when a speaker cancels at the last minute. 

Hubbs mentioned taking advantage of the Chapter Leaders Resource Guide. It gives strategies to increase membership, meeting attendance, networking and more. It is also valuable when brainstorming new ideas.

ACFE Regent and Singapore Chapter President David Rule, CFE later discussed the importance of growing relationships with other organizations. He described the relationships he built with the Hong Kong, Indonesia, Philippines and Malaysia Chapters and how they have worked together. 

ACFE Deputy Training Director, Liseli Pennings, CFE, continued discussing building relationships, specifically using the Overseas Security Advisory Council, the American Chamber of Commerce and embassies (international embassies in the U.S. and U.S. embassies overseas.) Pennings encouraged the local chapters to contact these organizations to create new alliances and ask for assistance in providing training opportunities.

The last block was presented by New Mexico Chapter President Beth Mohr, CFE, and New Mexico Chapter Treasurer Janet McHard, CFE. They stressed the importance of having a motivated and knowledgeable Board of Directors and said that just hoping for good people to come along to be board members is likely to fail. Chapter leaders need to proactively seek out strong members from meetings and use a one-on-one approach. 

One item that was discussed during the meeting was having an updated library available to the chapters. I will begin updating this list shortly. I also encourage all our chapter leaders to begin using the new ACFE Community. Soon, we will be creating an exclusive community for chapter leaders to communicate and ask questions from other leaders. For next year’s meeting, we will determine whether to lengthen the meeting to four hours and possibly run concurrent with the Pre-Conference. We will also determine the need to have smaller groups to discuss larger and smaller chapter issues, or U.S. and international chapter issues.

Thank you to all of you who attended. I look forward to another productive meeting at next year’s conference in Nashville.

Enjoy some pictures from the meeting below.