She talked for eleven minutes. I took four pages of notes.

The screening tools pull from public court records, credit bureau alerts, and adverse media, and the reason my name came back attached to four point six million dollars is that the forgeries are the primary documents and the judgment voiding them is a secondary record that most tools do not link.

There is no mechanism to attach a finding to an instrument. The instruments simply exist, with my name on them, forever.

But — and this was the eleven minutes — most enhanced due diligence processes have a documented exception pathway. Almost nobody uses it, because almost nobody knows it exists, and because the burden of assembling the packet falls on the subject and the subject is usually an individual with no lawyer and no idea.

“You are a forensic accountant with a criminal defense attorney’s name on your letterhead,” Priscilla Ochoa said. “You are possibly the single best-positioned human being in America to build that packet.

And when you’ve built it, it will work for you, and then you will have built the template.”