Fraud Advice

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, creditor fraud, supplier fraud, Internet fraud…the list can go on. You should not wait until your business becomes a victim as it inevitably will at some point, do something about it now.

Apart from the obvious security issues for your assets, you need to put together a fraud reduction strategy that will help protect your business from various types of fraud, phishing, pharming, identity theft plus hacking and virus threats to your IT systems.

Your data needs protecting also. Even apparently simple information such as your customer lists are valuable and you do not want your employees giving it to your competitors. The data can also be lost through burglary and criminal damage to your premises. Think of the effort that would be required trying to recreate this information.

Remember to vet your employees when recruiting. You want trustworthy workers who will not put your business and assets at risk. Resumes very often contain falsehoods, and at best exaggerations. Make sure you take up references, check periods of employment and question what an applicant was doing in a “gap” period. Perhaps they were doing time at Her Majesty’s pleasure for fraud! Yes fraudulent employees do commit the same crimes time and time again, moving from one complacent employer to another.

Complacency is the name of the game when it comes to fraud risk. Although it does not always pay to be overly oppressive in your anti-fraud policy and cause resentment and even fear amongst your staff, a tightly controlled work place will undoubtedly prevent the fraudster striking or at least make him think twice before having a go.

Mark Jenner is a forensic accountant and fraud expert advising companies on cost effective ways of preventing fraud.

There is a definite rise in the incidence of employment fraud during a recession, though this will often only come to light in the months and even years following an economic downturn. Some employment fraud however will be discovered during the downturn, as hard pressed companies take a closer look at their finances and discover losses might have been taking place.

Recessionary pressure affects employers as well as employees. Cutbacks have to be made and it is often the case that a company is in constant review of its finances, looking for ways to survive let alone grow and make profits. There will be constant talk of “tightening of belts” and likely rumours of redundancies – even if these do not actually take place. This has a knock on effect on the employees, many of whom will start to feel insecure in their jobs.

This leads to one of the drivers of employment fraud due to economic downturn. There is a decreased loyalty shown to the employer because of the real or imagined layoffs. This can result in some seeing the opportunity for compensation in the form of helping themselves fraudulently! This tendancy is even more marked if there have been reductions in pay levels or even cuts in overtime opportunity.

The second cause of employee fraud during an economic downturn is the financial hardship experienced by the employees families generally. Even if the employee is secure in his own position, a family member might have lost their own job and household income is reduced. It might even be perceived pressure from the need to save more in case of much greater hardship in the future.

The third clear driver in the increase in employee fraud during a recession comes from the cost cutting excercises that an employer might be taking. Very often non essential positions are cut. These tend to be the middle management levels, not the productive workers and not those in ultimate charge. The trouble is that this is the layer of management that effectively controls fraud within a business. It is the layer of supervision, the division of duties and monitoring that creates a secure financial system. Remove some or all of this and large windows of opportunity for the fraudster can appear. It often happens that internal audit and dedicated fraud prevention functions are seen as non essential and down sized accordingly.

With an increase in employee fraud and a reduced capability to deal with it, when a fraud does occur a company might find itself in the position of having to call in specialist fraud investigators. The cost of employing a fraud investigator in a recession is an added burden in trying to out ride the downturn.