Early Retention of Financial Experts in White Collar Proceedings with Anchin

We were thrilled to have Anthony Bracco and Brian Sanvidge of Anchin Accountants & Consultants as our February 2026 White Collar Support Group Tuesday Night Speaker Series presenters. They came to make the case for bringing a financial expert into a matter during the investigation, sometimes before any charge exists, and to be honest about what waiting actually costs. You can watch the full recording above.

Almost everyone who finds our group met their forensic accountant late, if they met one at all. By then the government’s loss number has been sitting on the table for months and nobody has argued with it. This hour is for anyone currently under investigation, for the families sitting in on those meetings, and for anyone who has been told that an expert is money they cannot spare yet.

Why hiring a forensic accountant late costs more, not less

Anthony opened on the objection he hears most, because it is the one that keeps people from picking up the phone. Nobody wants to pay a forensic team for a matter that might still resolve on its own.

The reality is it does not save money and can often cost more money.

Anthony Bracco

The arithmetic has nothing to do with hourly rates. Delay removes none of the work, it only compresses it, and compressed work gets done by the wrong people. On a short clock the senior person ends up doing the analysis that would otherwise have gone to a staffer, so you are paying partner rates for staff hours. The larger cost never appears on an invoice at all. Given months, a team can decide a question is not worth chasing. Given four weeks, nobody can afford to guess wrong, so they turn over every rock. There is a second bill. Counsel builds a theory, tells it to the government, and only then hands the documents to somebody qualified to read them. Anthony’s question for anyone in that position is whether the documents support the story you want to tell, and he would rather you learn the answer before the prosecutors have heard the story.

The government’s head start, and why redoing the loss number takes months

The government’s expert starts first and does not stop. Anthony puts the typical lead at several months, and his sharpest illustration is a civil dispute rather than a criminal case, which he says plainly before he tells it. Hundreds of millions of dollars moving across more than a hundred entities. His team had been in the documents for eighteen months when the other side retained a very capable expert with four months left before the hearing. He is candid that the gap never fully closes. It can be narrowed, and the narrowing is where cases move.

Investor money went into distressed real estate. The government seized the properties around 2007, and the receiver holding them sat through the financial crisis before selling at pennies on the dollar. The fight became what those properties were worth on the day they were taken, which meant appraising dozens of them as of a date years in the past, work nobody can do in a hurry. Brian testified in a separate matter involving a publicly traded stock, where the judge asked the government one question at sentencing and the answer moved the damages figure. What stayed with me is what defense counsel said afterward: he wished he had that number sooner, because it might have driven a settlement long before anyone stood up at sentencing. Both turned on a recalculated loss, which drives a sentencing guidelines range more than almost anything else in the file.

Can the government use what your own accountant finds?

The fear underneath the delay is often not money at all. It is the worry that an accountant who starts digging early turns up something that ends up in the government’s hands. Brian answered that with structure rather than reassurance.

So often what we’ll do is we’ll set these up where it’s a co-counsel agreement where we’re brought in as a consulting expert.

Brian Sanvidge

Privilege extends over the accountants, and what it buys is the freedom to investigate your own case in parallel with the government’s. You go hunting for your own bad facts on purpose, while there is still time to explain them, instead of meeting them a week out in somebody else’s framing. Much of this is ordinary practice for forensic accountants in white collar criminal defense, and almost none of it gets explained to the person whose name is on the case. For the rest of the picture, Doug Passon covered mitigation at sentencing with us, and the Women’s White Collar Defense Association | Restitution & Forfeiture Panel covered what happens to the money afterward.

About Anthony Bracco and Brian Sanvidge

Anthony Bracco and Brian Sanvidge work in the forensic and litigation support practice at Anchin, an accounting and advisory firm in New York founded in 1923. Both have spent decades alongside defense counsel in white collar criminal matters, on loss calculations, data and e-discovery, and testimony at sentencing. Brian spent 25 years in government before he moved into forensic consulting, directing the analysts and investigators who work files like these from the other side. He is blunt about what that taught him. The government’s real constraint is not money, it is what it chooses to prioritize, and he can tell you how that call gets made.