Whilst a compliance officer, I witnessed a wide variety of cute tricks, intentional disinformation, and even bold untruths contained in the applications from the prospective clients. The problem was, you never know how much of the client information was subsequently altered or doctored by the sales staff, either remotely, or in-house, so that they will pass muster with compliance. Your compliance training allows you to recognise information that is clearly inconsistent with the client's total picture, but the real challenge is to spot personal information that seems odd to your trained eye, and, using your analytical abilities, prove or disprove its truth and accuracy. That is where compliance advances beyond a learned skillset, and approaches a professional calling. Your ability to tie together a couple of seemingly authentic and ordinary answers to the clients' application and, after dissecting them, to either approve or decline the customer, is nothing less than an art, in my humble opinion. It must be learned over a period of time on the job, and cannot be taught. In law school, we are taught what is called issue perception, the ability to glean and extract the primary issues from a lengthy appellate decision. In compliance, there simply is no way to impart this focused analytical ability. You acquire it after reviewing many, many files; learning from your mistakes, and becoming sensitised to the nuances of new account personal information.

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