Columbus Zoo Fraud Case
Matthew T Klapheke - Senior Forensic Audit Manager
Marissa C. Marzick - Fraud Investigator
What happens when a beloved community institution becomes the center of one of the most significant nonprofit fraud investigations in recent memory? This compelling session examines the Columbus Zoo scandal, where a decade-long abuse of organizational resources by senior executives led to criminal convictions, prison sentences, and more than $2.3 million in identified misappropriated assets. Through the lens of the Ohio Auditor of State's extensive fraud examination, attendees will explore how personal perks, weak oversight, vendor relationships, promotional expenditures, and executive entitlement evolved into a complex fraud scheme that evaded detection for years.
More than just a case study, this presentation delivers powerful lessons for fraud examiners, auditors, investigators, compliance professionals, and nonprofit leaders. Attendees will gain insight into the investigative process, red flags that were missed, governance failures that enabled the misconduct, and the internal controls necessary to prevent similar abuses. The Columbus Zoo case serves as a stark reminder that fraud risks often arise not from financial desperation, but from unchecked authority, weak accountability, and a culture that tolerates exceptions.
The Modern Fraud Examiner’s Toolkit: AI, Analytics, Dashboards, and Clearer Reporting
Mark J. Nigrini, Ph.D.
Fraud examiners are under constant pressure to do more with less time. Modern productivity tools can help if they are practical, affordable, and easy enough to use in normal audit and investigative work.
This session introduces six productivity tools that can help fraud examiners work more efficiently from fieldwork through reporting. These useful tools are either free, low-cost, or already available in many organizations through Microsoft 365.
Professor Mark Nigrini, West Virginia University, author of Forensic Analytics and Benford’s Law, will demonstrate how these tools can reduce common time sinks. Applications will include formatting messy logs, standardizing dates, preparing transaction dumps for analysis, identifying outliers and unusual trends, reviewing policy documents and contracts, drafting audit findings, improving report readability, and converting text-heavy audit memos into clearer closing presentations. Used correctly, they can reduce routine work and allow fraud examiners to spend more time on interpretation and communication.
Attendees will receive a ten-page practical handout with suggested uses, sample prompts, and guidance on getting started with the tools. You will leave with a roadmap for using these selected productivity tools to improve audit planning, fieldwork, analytics, reporting, and presentations.
Topics
- Excel: A review of Power Query and the Analyze Data feature for data preparation, analysis, and insights.
- Power BI Desktop: An introduction to creating an audit dashboard to show trends, top vendors, exception counts, high-risk transactions, outliers, threshold-avoidance patterns, and the use of slicers.
- Gemini Notebook: What it is, plus a demonstration of asking source-grounded questions.
- Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat: A demo of interesting fraud examination-related prompts and applications.
- Grammarly: Using this tool to reduce wordiness, lower reading difficulty, eliminate passive voice where appropriate, identify unclear sentences, and make audit findings easier for busy executives to understand.
- Going from a text-heavy audit memo to corporate-ready slides: A comparison of leading AI tools for creating professional presentations, including Gamma and PowerPoint Designer.
- Bonus Conclusion: Coding in Python is not that difficult! With Python, a basic IDE such as PyCharm or Thonny, and an understanding of the fundamentals, you can ask ChatGPT to write code for many fraud examination and data-analysis tasks.
