Outside Looks

By Rick Nason, PhD, CFA
Partner, RSD Solutions Inc.

I reside in Halifax, Nova Scotia.  The buzz over the last week in this Navy town has been about the Canadian Navy staffer who pled guilty to selling military information to the Russians.  It appears this staffer had high-level clearance and was actually working in intelligence himself.

With all of the background checks required for a secret intelligence position you might wonder how an intelligence staffer could be selling secrets to the Russians undetected.  The case is even more perplexing as the person made short term trips to out of the way places like Brazil and came back with relatively large amounts of cash.  All the signs of something funny going on were there in plain sight.

The irony continues, as it was the FBI who notified the Canadian Military and other Canadian officials about such questionable behavior for a person in such a position.  It was only at this point that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) began to investigate.

Sometimes situations are like that.  We do all of the audits (background checks), and tick all of the boxes for risk management, but it takes an outsider to let us know that something is amiss.  Does your risk department have the ability to utilize outside looks?