Bernadette Ruggiero, CFE

“From an educational background perspective, interviewing and legal aspects [tools for gathering non-financial evidence] are taught in arts and sciences colleges, while forensic accounting is taught in business schools. Therefore, generally speaking, an accounting major has had little to no relevant education in the areas of sociology, psychology, and anthropology to assist in these techniques and tools.”

(Singleton 240)
Singleton, Tommie W., Aaron Singleton. Fraud Auditing and Forensic Accounting, 4th Edition. John Wiley & Sons P&T, 2010-08-23. VitalBook file.

From an early age, Bernadette Ruggiero has had a passion for the mysteries life has to offer and how to solve them. She would do role plays with her best friend at the age of ten and enact as Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson crawling in dark and musty attics looking for secrets to unravel. Her desire to better understand the complicated human nature led her first to pursue a degree in sociology in Dresden, Germany. She would travel to the United States two months after graduating in 2001 for the first time only to fall in love with the stunning nature of the East End of Long Island. 9/11 made her shorten her trip and return to Germany where she would build a career in market research in London, GB, Heidelberg, and Dresden, Germany. While she appreciated those years occupied in secure and well paying jobs her unquenchable thirst for adventure and cultural exposure eventually made her leave Germany in 2006.

Living in the U.S. for the past sixteen years has tremendously shaped her professional focus. The drive to keep pursuing her interest for numbers but at the same time find an intriguing application for her social science background made her decide to add a degree in forensic accounting to her educational portfolio. Her work as a bookkeeper and business consultant brought along a broad range of clientele which required her to constantly adjust to new challenges and situations. This insight into the day-to-day financial operations of businesses ranging from general contractors, retail, to nonprofits has provided her with a bottom-up (rather than the usual CPA top-down) hands on perspective. She received her Certified Fraud Examiner certification in July 2019, a globally recognized credential by the Association of Fraud Examiners (ACFE).

Bernadette loves literature (fiction and non-fiction) and is currently in the process of trying to find an agent for her first novel (about the creative struggles of a painter living through Nazi-Germany and Communist-Germany). She is an avid runner, swimmer, snowboarder and paddle boarder and has recently taken up to play chess with her son and to learn to play the piano.