Marta Andreasen, the former chief accountant for the European Commission, has won this year’s Cliff Robertson Sentinel Award given by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE).
The award, established by the actor Cliff Robertson, recognizes an individual’s efforts to root out fraud. While at the EC, Andreasen discovered inadequate internal controls, with about 95% of the payments from the budget lacking reliable support, which translated into a potentially massive fraud on a budget estimated at $120 billion.
According ACFE, Andreasen declined to sign off on various accounts, but when she reported the problems to her superiors, she was suspended for two years. Commenting on the award’s title, Toby Bishop, ACFE president and CEO, said “It's time to replace the negative term ‘whistle-blower' with the positive term ‘sentinel,'” says “And it's time to value and respect those people who are willing to do the right thing to help protect the integrity of their organization.”
