Matthew Rees is a Director in FRA’s London office in the Forensic Accounting team. Matthew has over 20 years’ experience of delivering forensic accounting, data analytics and internal audit services. He has worked on engagements in a wide range of industries including banking, pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, oil and gas and fine art gained in many regions including Africa, Central America and the Middle East.

Prior to joining FRA, Matthew spent 5 years in the Internal Audit team at Citigroup where he was responsible for providing assurance over fraud risk and designing and implementing audit programs and enabling tools. This included development of a framework for Fraud Risk Assessment which was then used to identify and mitigate fraud risks for each of Citi’s products, functions and processes. In addition he conducted investigations in response to concerns escalated by regulators and through the bank’s own ethics reporting channels.

Matthew spent 15 years at Big 4 accounting firms where he led a wide variety of investigations and dispute and competition related matters. He focused on the integration of innovative forensic technology techniques within his engagements and developed software tools to interrogate accounting data. He has extensive experience of using visualisation techniques to enable the extraction of intelligence from large scale datasets.

Matthew was seconded as a fraud and data analytics SME to EY’s global external audit transformation initiative. During this 18 month period, he was responsible for the development of new audit methodologies and tools with a focus on improving both audit efficiency and coverage. This work included ensuring that audit design better focused on the identification of client specific risks and the accrual of audit evidence to address those risks.

Throughout his career Matthew has designed and delivered training programs on fraud and forensic technology and was a member of Citigroup Internal Audit’s coaching faculty. He has published articles on forensic accounting in general and the application of technology in particular and he was the contributing editor of the book “Corporate Fraud – The Human Factor” (Bloomsbury, 2014).

Matthew is a member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales and a Certified Fraud Examiner.