Delegates from the United States (US) and the Caribbean are expected to gather at Hilton Rose Hall in Montego Bay, St James, this Thursday and Friday for the fifth annual International Association of Document Examiners (IADE) Conference. This year’s conference theme is ‘In the Box and Beyond, An Expert Continued Journey’.

Jamaica will be hosting the conference for the second time under the chairmanship of Beverley East, chair of the organisation’s ethics committee, document examiner, and author. The goal of the conference is to bring experts together to share their knowledge.

East, who was successful in moving the conference outside the US for the first time in 2015, is honoured to be hosting it again. This year’s keynote speaker is Brigadier General Becky Halstead (Retired), the first female graduate of West Point to become a general officer, and is an author, widely sought-after leadership consultant and motivational speaker.

“The IADE has members from more than 10 countries, including New Zealand, Armenia, Malaysia and the United Kingdom. At this conference, we will have document examiners from California, New York, Colorado, Indiana, North Carolina, Baltimore, and Antigua. For the first time, local non-examiners with an interest in our profession will be joining the conference in the hope that our field will assist them in their own areas of expertise,” East said.

These include investigators from the Major Organised Crime and Anti-Corruption Agency, the Independent Commission of Investigations, and Antigua’s Office of the National Drug and Money Laundering Control Policy.

East says this year’s conference aims to expand what has been learnt from our career’s pitfalls and successes; enhance beliefs and create new forums for discussions and to educate, bring new ideas of measuring and identifying false documents and elevate each other in the forum that accommodates growth.

Brigadier General Becky Halsted will in her keynote address, focus on ethics. She will speak to participants about being trustworthy and having a high standard, but more importantly, holding themselves accountable before they think of holding anyone else to account.

“Another challenge we have in politics, government and the workplace, is that we often want to hold others to a standard we can’t live up to. That is a double standard which leads to mediocrity which breeds mistrust. I will talk about being trustworthy, dependable and loyalty – not blind loyalty… which is born out of trust,” Brigadier General Halsted said.

“In order to live an ethical life you have to understand the values that are important and live them in action and behaviour that reflect those values, be true to self and people you work for or with. We are in a time of social media and a lot of ways to get information. But information (the fact), is different from knowledge... which is what we do with the facts.”