The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners presented its 2025 Cressey Award to Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, director-general of the World Trade Organization, during its global fraud conference in Nashville.
“The Cressy award is the highest honor awarded by the ACFE and is presented to an individual who has demonstrated a lifetime of achievement in the detection and deterrence fraud,” said ACFE CEO John Warren during the conference Monday. “In her remarkable career spanning more than 40 years, she’s informed global economic policy and supported international development in a variety of roles. She became the first woman to serve as Nigeria’s foreign affairs and finance minister, and during that time, she oversaw reforms to fight corruption in the country and help negotiate a multibillion-dollar write-off of Nigeria’s national debt, giving the country a much needed financial rebound. Dr. Okonjo-Iweala spent 25 years at the World Bank, and she currently serves on the board of trustees of the World Economic Forum.”
She is the author of a book called “Fighting Corruption is Dangerous,” which she learned firsthand when investigating a fuel subsidy scam and her mother was kidnapped.
“It was the worst five days of my life during the time she was held, but we didn’t back down,” said Okonjo-Iweala. “She eventually escaped, and that’s another story. When that didn’t work, they decided to come after me directly, not to kill me outright, but to maim me, to put me in a wheelchair for the rest of my life and force me out of the finance ministry. But this plan, thankfully, did not work either. As we received information on the plots, that enabled us to take appropriate security precautions.”
She noted that solutions to the problems lie within domestic governments as well as with individuals, businesses and societies. “But something else I realized as finance and foreign minister was that a substantial amount of corruption has an international identity, and that tackling it will demand, not only reform at home, but also cooperation and action by foreign governments and companies,” she said. “Fraud and corruption can manifest in illicit financial flows that cross international borders.”
“We have a huge mission to fulfill as a profession,” said Warren. “We have enormous challenges to face, and we are stronger as an association than we are alone.”
Another honoree was journalist Marina Walker Guevara, who won the Guardian Award. An executive editor at the Pulitzer Center, she was deputy director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, where she managed two of the largest collaborations of reporters in journalism history, the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers, which involved hundreds of journalists using technology to unravel stories of public interest from terabytes of leaked financial data. She noted that $1.2 billion was recovered by the Internal Revenue Service in response to the leak of the Panama Papers.
The ACFE also honored Erin Johnson, lead program analyst for the Veterans Administration, as Certified Fraud Examiner of the Year. She led the design and implementation of a new platform that was built to manage data and improve fraud detection, Warren noted, and she also helped implement enhanced security protocols to protect Medal of Honor recipients. “Her efforts have led to the recovery of hundreds of thousands of dollars in fraudulent payments, and they prevented far more than that from being lost to fraudsters,” said Warren.
He noted that last year, the U.S. Government Accountability Office calculated that the U.S. government loses as much as $521 billion per year to fraud and that was only looking to fraud in federal government payments. “It didn’t even take into account tax fraud or other stolen revenues,” he added. “It didn’t include state and local governments.”
The ACFE, in its most recent Report to the Nations in 2024, estimated the typical organization loses 5% of its revenue to fraud, translating to about $5 trillion per year.
