Crawford & Company has promoted Stephen Stafford to head of forensic accounting services in Australia.
Stafford (pictured), with 30 years of experience and three years at Crawford, will lead a 17-member team providing financial loss adjusting services across a range of sectors.
The team’s services include handling business interruption losses, stock losses, fidelity guarantees, cyber claims, class actions, expert witness assignments, product recall and contamination cases, recoveries, and liability claims.
The previous head of forensic accounting, Grahem Peters, will continue at Crawford as national executive adjuster and head of class actions.
Stafford’s career with Crawford began in mid-2021 as a senior forensic accountant. Within four months, he was promoted to executive general adjuster and regional manager for Queensland.
“Stephen has a way of motivating everyone to be the best version of whatever they want to be; whether that is ambition for leadership roles, or becoming a high-level technical expert, or simply being the most productive and efficient loss adjuster. He’s got a great rapport with the existing team,” said Crawford Australia president Jonathan Hubbard. “It’s also really pleasing to make this appointment from within our own ranks. We unapologetically have targets around internal appointments and promotions. Where we have vacancies and we also have people with the right skills internally, it just makes good business sense to appoint from within because it brings a level of continuity to our teams and our clients.”
Stafford emphasised the forensic accounting team’s diversity and collaborative approach.
“The diversity of backgrounds and experiences with our forensic accounting team make for a very strong unit, with collaboration from every adjuster utilised as much as possible. There’s been lots of occasions when those of us ‘longer in the tooth’ find an alternate approach to adjusting a loss from our younger colleagues; that’s fantastic… the learning goes both ways and I encourage that,” he said.
To enhance the value of forensic accounting services, Stafford said he would focus on education and knowledge-sharing initiatives.
“We frequently come across stakeholders unaware of how business interruption policies work in the event of a loss, and this results in confusion and frustration for many. We are ramping up our work with different parties, such as insurers, brokers, and insureds to share our technical expertise through education sessions and technical papers to try and reduce that knowledge gap,” he said.
