FBI Files
By Petra Bartosiewicz
She’s pulled a gun at work, carried a hidden camera in her handbag, and posed as someone’s wife. Safe to say, Eulondra Griffith is not your average college graduate who holds an accounting degree; the weapons and the subterfuge are just another day at the office for Griffith, except the office is the FBI.
Supervisory special agent Griffith is one of 2,000 law enforcement officers at the Federal Bureau of Investigation who, along with their traditional gumshoe detective training, have accounting or CPA backgrounds in their investigative arsenals. Among the 300 violations that the FBI investigates —including the mob bust-ups and murders that make the headlines—are a host of white collar and financial crimes. These include bank fraud (which results in 100 times more money lost than through robberies), health care and corporate fraud, and a terrorism financing unit (which pursues the money trails that help fund terrorists) that’s been ramped up since 9/11.
Griffith says her accounting degree has proven indispensable at the FBI, whether she’s analyzing complex financial statements, tracking the proceeds of fraud schemes, or deciphering complicated money-laundering transactions. In her 15 years with the bureau, she’s chased down identity thieves, investigated crooked CEOs, and traced money trails throughout the Middle East and Switzerland.
“[The FBI] looks for accountants because they’re known to possess strong analytical and cognitive skills,” says Griffith. Plus, the bureau needs people who know their way around a balance sheet—which can be the key to solving a host of crimes.
Back in 1985, when she received her degree at the University of Houston, Griffith never imagined a career path that would lead her to become a real-life Clarice Starling (the intrepid FBI agent in the film Silence of the Lambs). Instead, her first jobs out of college were stints at Texaco and at a certain ill-fated natural gas company named Enron. Long before Enron’s top executives were walked out of their offices in handcuffs for defrauding the company, Griffith worked there as a senior accountant. She liked the job, but when one night she heard an FBI recruiter make his pitch at a meeting of a professional accounting group she belonged to in Houston, she was intrigued by the excitement the bureau promised. Far from an everyday grind, the recruiter said the FBI would open the door to a life of traveling to far-flung destinations and a steady flow of high-stakes cases. Virtually every part of her work at the FBI would draw on her skills as an accountant, from looking for clues hidden in complex financial documents to using her analytical skills to solve difficult cases.
“I took it as a challenge,” says Griffith. “It’s a big deal, going from a desk job to being responsible for your own cases where someone goes to jail at the end.”
Griffith applied even though she told the recruiter she was worried because she’d never handled a gun before. No problem, he said, the FBI would train her to shoot.
Seven months later, Griffith, then 27, arrived at the FBI’s training headquarters in Quantico, Virginia, where like every other incoming agent she spent 16 weeks getting schooled in weapons, self-defense, and how to grill a suspect. It wasn’t long before her accounting skills were put to use, though. In her first posting she was assigned to the financial institution fraud squad in Dallas, where she began investigating bank crimes like false loans, identity theft, and fake accounts. “It’s like bank robbery, but the weapon is not a gun, it’s a pen,” says Griffith.
One of her bigger cases involved busting a ring of identity thieves who were stealing from credit unions across the country. The thieves would rummage through the dumpsters of these establishments to retrieve bank records of account holders whom they would impersonate to withdraw money. Griffith and her squad figured out the scheme and issued fraud alerts to warn the credit unions. Their work paid off after a three-year investigation, when the thieves were caught red-handed by the police.
Griffith’s accounting skills also came into play when she worked in the bankruptcy division at the bureau’s Los Angeles field office, tracking people who had illegally tried to hide assets in U.S. and overseas bank accounts after declaring bankruptcy.
In another case, she went undercover for seven months in a massive medical billing investigation that targeted individuals fraudulently billing the government for medical equipment like canes and wheelchairs. One of the keys to solving that case, says Griffith, was in making sense of the reams of billing statements agents were sifting through. “You had to analyze those records and trace the proceeds,” says Griffith.
White-collar crime isn’t the only area where having an accounting degree can give you a significant leg up at the FBI. A critical part of the bureau’s effort to apprehend terrorists involves tracking the money that funds their activities. In the wake of 9/11, the FBI formed a terrorism financing operations section that coordinates the financial side of investigations of key Al Qaeda operatives. At a congressional hearing last year, the head of the section, Michael Morehart, described how agents glean vital clues by tracing financial records connected to terrorists. The goal is to block terrorist assets worldwide; agents look at money laundering, shell corporations, and informal money transfers.
Whether the terrorists and their networks derive their money from legal or illegal activities, “it usually leaves a trail that can be exploited by law enforcement,” says Morehart.
These days Griffith is based at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., where she oversees the bureau’s corporate fraud cases against companies like World Com, Tyco, Adelphia, and, yes, even her former employer Enron.
With the Enron case, Griffith’s career might have come full circle, except that when she asked to work the investigation, the bureau feared a conflict of interest and didn’t let her participate: She’d lost $12,000 of her retirement plan through the company’s demise and was technically considered a victim of the company’s fraud.
Griffith says much of the corporate fraud the FBI investigates usually leads to the top of the executive food chain, where the head honchos devise schemes to falsely inflate their revenues, like hiding expenses in order to increase their incomes (think the $1 million in company funds that Tyco chief executive Dennis Kozlowski blew for a lavish toga-themed birthday party for his wife on the island of Sardinia).
So how does the FBI track down these crooked CEOs? They follow the financial clues, watching for earnings corrections and stock downturns, both of which can mean the books have been cooked. Often they work with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which looks at possible civil violations, while the FBI focuses on criminal activity.
Griffith says that individuals with accounting skills are highly sought-after for special agent positions, and not just in the terrorist financing and white-collar units. The FBI has over 12,400 active agents in 56 field offices throughout the country (they hired 1,000 new agents in the past year alone). And while all incoming agents receive the same basic training, the special skills you bring to the job help set you apart.
Most rewarding, says Griffith, is the autonomy she has in her work. She’s a major player in the cases she works on, whether they involve financial crimes or criminal cases like hate crimes or serial arson.
“When you’re a case agent, you are the lead investigator and you control the investigative procedure, who you should interview,” says Griffith. “Definitely the job satisfaction is great.”
And that’s before you count the car chases, the disguises, or the stakeouts.
WANNA WORK AT THE FBI?
At the FBI you can put your accounting skills to use in a whole range of white collar and criminal cases. An accounting degree will give you a major advantage in competing for special agent positions, especially in areas like the bureau’s financial crimes and terrorism financing units. Before specializing, however, all incoming agents need to meet some basic requirements:
1. You must be a U.S. citizen and have at least a high school education (a college degree is required for Special Agent positions);
2. You must pass a background check;
3. You must pass a physical exam and fitness test;
4. You must be willing to relocate anywhere that the FBI has jurisdiction;
5. For Special Agent positions, all candidates must be between 23 and 36, have a valid driver’s license, and pass a polygraph examination.
For more information, check out the FBI’s Web site at www.fbijobs.gov/