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Cristina Revelo: Essentially, what path to take tax and audit were the big ones right at career fairs and there was one small booth talking about forensics, and so I approached it to learn more about it.
I had a chance to take a class sort of related to that the following year at school and decided like that's where I want it to be so that's sort of how I got introduced to forensics just casually walking in a career, fair and I kicked off my career at the big four accounting firm KPMG and from there did just a wide variety of Industries and different clients working on different projects investigations fraud.
Those type of things, but then also sort of core elements of risk assessments compliance work and that's when I identified that I truly had more of a passion for the compliance aspect and progress my career and that path moved on to several compliance related and risk assessment related roles.
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Cristina Revelo: And now I am a compliance monitor at Affiliated Monitors.
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Cristina Revelo: This year, and you know it's harder with the pandemic right, so the easiest way is to really just reach out to people on Linkedin reach out set up a call or virtual coffee date and get things started from there, so and that's what we did, and I appreciate you taking that up.
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Cristina Revelo: it's a little bit of a timeout yeah so modern ships in general, historically, have been sort of the timeout situations right so if you violate some sort of law or regulation, depending on the regulatory body, then you might be fined. Maybe someone goes to jail, but mostly mandatory fines. And from there, you could be assigned a monitor it's not mandatory, but as we recently just discussed, you know, there may be more monitorships coming up and really the purpose of the monitor is to help.
The company ensures that they're continuing to comply with whatever law regulation that they violated in the first place, and they have someone to help them.
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Cristina Revelo: You know answer questions or guide but also someone to monitor them right so make sure that they're doing it that they're checking the box, but.
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Cristina Revelo: Not just from a check the box exercise but truly from an implementation, so ensuring that companies don't have a paper program what we call them and they have a true compliance program where.
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Cristina Revelo: There are controls in place and everyone sort of executing their procedures, the way that they were intended, so we do.
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Kelly Paxton: Well, and this is another thing and I heard you talking with Lisa about this at one point in your career, you turned down a promotion and I don't know a lot of people who turned down promotion so tell us a little bit about that if you can.
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Cristina Revelo: Yes, I did at the time it kind of just happened and I did it. I'm glad I did, because I think it would have changed my career path, a little bit, and I really enjoy where my career path is now.
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Cristina Revelo: And I loved and after that you know, I was really afraid I wasn't sure if this was a career limiting move. Just sort of saying no to senior leadership.
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Cristina Revelo: But they really respected me for it, and when the next opportunity came up of something that was a promotion, but it was more aligned to my career goals they reached out to me and I accepted it, so it was a positive experience at the time.
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Cristina Revelo: I've been very lucky to have really good leaders, whether they were my direct supervisors, or maybe our Vice President of you know, our department or something.
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Cristina Revelo: I've had great leaders who have always challenged me and believed them, so I think that in itself has really helped me grow my career and progress my career and place me and then expose me to certain situations that have helped me progress my career so not two or three.
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Cristina Revelo: But I think it took me close to 10 years to understand the definition of success or really have a better grasp on what that means, to me, I think, earlier on in my career, I thought success was getting a promotion every so often in making X amount of money being able to pay off your loans and you know college that and so forth, I thought that was successful like Oh, I made it I'm making X amount of money, I paid off my loans I'm so successful as I progress in my career and was able to receive those promotions, and just do grade and then really enjoy the work that I was doing.
I found myself at a point where money didn't make a difference in the title honestly was not that important to me, things that were important to me, was being close to my family, seeing my niece grow and that to me was success in my life right and incorporated.
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Kelly Paxton: And then the fun last question is, what is the last thing you Google or whatever search engine you like, before you started this interview.
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Cristina Revelo: I actually was googling something for a client, but I was also reading up on what you mentioned at the beginning on the deputy attorney general's speech at the White Collar Crime Conference, because we've been reading up on it in discussing it internally.
So that was just something that I was reading right before we started this oh yes.
The whole monitorship world was new to me until I started following Great Women in Compliance. I mean I had heard about it but was not aware of how big it was. And now it is getting bigger. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please let me know if you like the intro with a podcast or book selection. I love the reviews please keep them coming. Next week is Mariel Klosterman. Learn all about sock puppets. You will start seeing even more of Mariel as she is an up-and-comer in the OSINT space. Thank you.
Cristina Revelo is a deputy director Corporate Monitoring and Compliance Services at Affiliated Monitors. She started out as a forensic accountant at a big 4. Listen to her career progression and how reaching out really changed her trajectory. Monitorships are here to stay and are going to be growing according to Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco.