Our advisers

Alex Balbuena
Senior Consultant

Professional experience

Alex is a Forensic Accountant with over 12 years professional experience in the audit and forensic accounting fields. He has operated his own audit and forensic services business which delivered tailored forensic and financial audits to SMEs in Mexico. He also gained experience at BDO International, where he conducted financial investigations including of fraud, business valuations and quantification of loss.

Alex is an expert in Data Analytics and provides support to the PKF team in Australia in the conduct of financial and non-financial investigations. He can analyse complex data sets that enable him to identify patterns and trends that may be indicative or fraud and/or error.

Since joining PKF Integrity, Alex has provided data analysis and general investigation support in the investigation of allegations of fraud in the private, public, including local government, and not-for-profit sectors as well as conducting risk assessments, many of which have focused on the procurement function.

He has also assisted in the investigation of allegations of bullying and harassment, sexual harassment, and other workplace misconduct.

Area of expertise

• Data Analytics
• External and Internal Audit
• Non-financial and financial investigations
• Payroll Compliance reviews

Significant engagements

• Workcover insurance – Loss Prevention: Was a valuable member of the highly skilled forensic data analytics team and implemented a Loss Prevention Program for a Workcover insurance organisation. Developed complex codes in SQL language, comprising of thousands of lines, to support the creation of a data warehouse with over 65 million of lines of optimised data ready for analysis. Designed analytical queries for data mining and interrogation as part of a semi-automated “rules engine” designed to identify occurrences of fraud, waste and abuse. This program significantly enhanced the internal capability of the Workcover insurance organisation to combat fraud and meanwhile also identified
  potential instances of fraud and projected prevented losses of circa $80m.
• Mining Group – Payroll inefficiencies: Led a comprehensive payroll compliance review for a
  Queensland based coal mining group with over 600 employees. Assessed the accuracy, compliance and effectiveness of the end-to-end payroll process and its internal controls.
• Construction company - Underpayment of salary benefits: Conducted a comprehensive data analytics exercise to recalculate the payroll of a construction company for a period of 2.5 years. Undertook a challenging data preparation procedure on a large number of datasets with timesheets for over 300 employees, where numerous individual datasets
  were obtained by month and by 98 different projects.

Qualifications and memberships

• Certified Fraud Examiner by the ACFE,
• Certificate III in Investigative Services,
• Certificate IV in Government Investigations,
• Diploma in Fraud Control (in progress)
• Specialist Postgraduate Degree in Financial Audit
• (Mexico),
• Master of Taxation (Mexico),
• Bachelor in business administration (Mexico)