When you consider purchasing a house with the help of a mortgage, you must first find out how much home loan amount you can afford to repay on time. How much of an expensive house you can purchase depends on the amount you can get. So, before searching for your dream house, ask yourself -“how [...]

I have always liked the various regional fraud forums (or should it be fora?). They provide a great networking event for me as a forensic accountant specialising in fraud to attend. Since meeting with Northumbria Police ‘s Phil Butler prior to the inaugural North East Fraud Forum event – must be as far back as [...]

It is difficult to believe that we are already into month 6 of 2010. It only seems like yesterday that I returned from my holiday in New York to the minus 15 degree centigrade weather at Manchester Airport at the beginning of January! Now five months later and we have a new Conservative government (Liberally [...]

One of the most common questions asked of employment lawyers is how to safely sack an employee or director who is suspected of being on the take.  It is a question that often cascades down to forensic accountants who are asked to provide financial evidence for the frauds or assist with tracing and recovering the [...]

Identity theft is a subject that is raised and discussed at many fraud forums and similarly reported in an increasing number of news articles. It is not just the cloning of identities followed by fraudulently obtaining goods or services on credit cards that results from identity thefts. Some very complex frauds are built on false identities and credibility [...]

For some time there has been a general feeling held by public and private sector fraud practitioners that the issue of fraud in the UK was not treated as seriously as it should. Campaigns by bodies such as the Association of Chief Police Officers (“ACPO”), the highly successful regional fraud fora and many others, have [...]

According to the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) some 20% of all crime takes place on business premises. When you think of all the theft, murder, drugs and the like, this is an awful lot of crime! The reason of course is that businesses are the target for all forms of fraud – employee fraud, [...]

For there to be a meaningful fight against fraud there needs to be a legal system capable of dealing with the cases brought by the prosecution authorities. There is no point beefing up the police fraud squads and giving them resources (which should include adequate funding for forensic accountants) to investigate fraudulent activity if the [...]

In October 2008 the Attorney General’s Office in the UK established the National Fraud Strategic Authority (NFSA) as a result of its Fraud Review in 2006. Being true to form for government agencies it has already had its first change of name to the National Fraud Authority (NFA)! The NFA web site does not appear to [...]

2010 opens with thick snow and ice. I was lucky as my trip to New York in the first week of the New Year went without hitch. Our flights and connections seemed to match the few windows in the weather and no delays were experienced. There was one small worry when blizzards started raging in [...]