Influential Woman · Fraud Examination and Accounting
Cynthia White
Fraud Prevention Specialist, Ru4Real.info
Palm City, FL 34990
Her Story
About Cynthia
My career in accounting spans 40 years, beginning when I was just learning to drive at 16 years old. I graduated college with my bachelor's degree in accounting, plus the 165 credits needed to sit for the CPA exam in Florida, putting me just 6 credits away from a master's degree. I opened my own business, Accelerated Accounting Systems, and we did on-site bookkeeping as well as taxes for small businesses and individuals. I was probably one of the first people to do portable bookkeeping, using a double-entry system on my laptop to go in and reconcile books, do general ledgers, print out financial statements, profit and loss statements, balance sheets, payroll journals, sales tax, whatever they needed, all on-site. We had 10 years of great business, but then QuickBooks came in and kind of took it away. People didn't want to pay my fees anymore and decided to do their own bookkeeping. So I jumped on the bandwagon, became a QuickBooks pro, started training, and eventually merged with a CPA firm. I passed the CPA exam but never got the license because my father passed away during that time. I ended up with a job with the Internal Revenue Service for 10 years, which gave me the auditing piece of the puzzle that I felt I didn't have. That's when the fraud came in, because we did fraud analysis on every single case. I had fraud cases, I was a coordinator, I actually talked to people that were in jail. After I left the IRS, I got into a couple years of tax resolution, which really strengthened my expertise with state forms and federal notices, statutory laws and regulations. In December, at 56 years old, I got my Certified Fraud Examiner certification, which I'm very proud of. It took a lot of work with four very intensive exams. Now my new light is fraud, stomping out fraud. I'm going into retirement homes and doing fraud talks for free for the elderly, giving them 15 minutes of fraud talk. Then I'm going into businesses to educate people and do audits in receivables, payables, or payroll. I also have my business, Are You For Real, INFO, where I'm creating a text phone number with a bot so people can reach out if they suspect fraud.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Cynthia
01What do you attribute your success to?
I attribute my success to education and knowledge. A college degree is something I know a lot of people don't believe in anymore, but I still feel education is something you never, ever lose. No one can take it away from you. As you learn, whether you're in your 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, knowledge is something that you can always have in you. The education that's available to us today is so abundant, you should reach out and get it, because that's one thing they can't take away from you. No one can tell you you don't know what you know. You can prove to them that you do know what you know. Knowledge is power, and that's why I emphasize fraud education so much. One of the reasons I survived my transitions was because of my knowledge base. At an AI conference I attended in Texas, the last speaker stood in front of all of us and said, 'Knowledge. AI is all about knowledge, guys, you guys need to know this.' And she's right. We need to make sure we're more knowledgeable than that bot. That's what's going to save us.
02What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
First of all, being healthy. Waking up in the morning with a good night's sleep, eating right, stretching, exercising, getting a good night's sleep. You guys don't want to do that. For some reason, these young kids think they're like supermen, they think they can live on 2 or 3 hours, but you can't do it. My generation, we had structure. We were in bed by 9:30, we were up by 6:30. That was my structure. That was what my mom and dad did. I did it with my kids. In my mind, having the sleep, eating right, and just making sure you take time for yourself is so important. Get a good knowledge base out there. Really show what you know, because knowledge is what's going to carry you through any transition that you have. The education that's available to us today is so abundant, reach out and get it, because that's one thing they can't take away from you.
03What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
The challenges in our field is the fact that I think the net worth of an accountant, even a bookkeeper, or even a tax professional in the state of Florida isn't recognized. I don't know why people feel in Florida they don't need to pay their accountants. In Florida, accountants get the least amount of pay, for some reason, than from New York. I think it's because we have an older generation, and they just don't want to pay their accountants. Another obstacle is that I like stability, I like something that is consistent. I don't like transitions. I felt like my career should have been more consistent, maybe, and not have as many transitions, but our world is changing. We went from paper to non-paper. Now everything's going into portals, everything is now AI. So you have to change, or you're going to get lost. Is the change bad, or is it good? It's hard to tell. I'm taking an AI certification right now to be able to build these AI agents, and it's amazing what they can do. It's opening my eyes, but I see why people are scared, because bots can talk to bots. Because of my fraud background and auditing background, I have a feeling penetration audits are going to be needed. People are going to have to hire people to come in and really penetrate these AI tasks to make sure they're going right, that something didn't get changed and they don't even know it. The smarter AI gets, the smarter the hackers get. But there's nothing like human. You can't get away from the human.
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