Associate Professor and expert financial fraud researcher Kelly Richmond Pope has had quite the year. In addition to her teaching and research at DePaul, she launched a new podcast about detecting fraud called “Nothing but the Truth,” she recorded a TEDxDePaul lecture about whistleblowers that got so popular it’s now featured on the TED Talks website, and she also released a feature-length documentary, “All the Queen’s Horses,” to rave revi
ews.
Chicago Sun-Times film critic Richard Roeper gave her film 31⁄2 stars out of 4 and said, “Kudos to director Kelly Richmond Pope for applying just the right mix of ‘What the Heck?’ whimsy and respectful, serious reporting to this incredible tale.” In this documentary, her second feature-length film, Pope explores the largest case of municipal fraud in American history. “Numbers tell the best stories,” Pope says. “That is why you see so many crime stories in television and film. If you can pair the understanding of numbers and story with a camera, then you have a very powerful way to communicate with people.”
“All the Queen’s Horses” tells the story of the fraud committed by Rita Crundwell, a midlevel government employee in the town of Dixon, Ill., who siphoned $53 million in public funds from the town over the course of 20 years. Pope notes that true-crime television shows, like CNBC’s “American Greed,” and the film “The Wolf of Wall Street” often focus primarily on fraudsters and what they do with the money they take. In Crundwell’s case, it was spending her millions on show horses.
“What made me want to make the film was that I was concerned that the necessary message was not getting communicated,” Pope says. “It bothered me that the national media coverage focused on the woman who stole money and what she did with the millions. But there’s a much larger story than that. That story is: how does a fraud of this size happen?”
Pope focuses the film less on Crundwell and more on the actual fraud so that it can serve as a lesson on how opportunities to perpetrate fraud present themselves and expose how fraud is actually committed. She uses her new film and a previous education documentary, “Crossing the Line,” which features interviews with people who committed fraud, in the classroom to teach her accounting students at DePaul. Pope believes that the films, along with her TEDx talk, enhance students’ understanding of fraud and how to discover it through forensic accounting.
“You would be surprised at the discussion we have when I use films and television shows in an accounting class in comparison to traditional paper/ pencil cases,” she says. “Fraud films ignite the classroom discussion. I hope that my students will understand that their roles as future auditors are important and that these situations can and will happen to them—not only discovering fraud, but being tempted by fraud.”
“All the Queen’s Horses” is now available on multiple video-on-demand platforms, including Netflix, iTunes, Google Play, Vudu, Amazon Prime Video and YouTube. “Nothing but the Truth” is also available on iTunes.
