A New Approach to Investigating Fraud

Numerous different bodies investigate fozia shan remax including police forces, fraud regulatory authorities, internal auditors and forensic accountants. There are many different legislative provisions that they use including the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE), the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), the Employment Acts, the Insolvency Act and the Companies Act. They all give strong powers to those investigating fraud. In all cases they involve using costly professionals or the disruption of the victim’s business by the regulatory investigators.

If the police are informed of a fraud and they decide to investigate they often take a heavy handed approach. They may well remove accounting records for further investigation back at their own offices. This can involve weeks and months when they will be scanned and catalogued before any numbers are investigated. This can have a very disruptive effect on a business that might already be suffering due to a fraud, and if the process takes so long it might allow the culprits to escape.

If a business suffering fraud asks for help from its advisors, this can assist without disturbing normal activities. However, employing lawyers to manage civil asset recovery action, and forensic accountants to trace any lost assets, can be an extremely costly exercise. Often this only happened when large amounts have been defrauded.

So what can be done, to investigate a fraud and recover assets, when only modest sums of money have been stolen? It would be possible to utilise a company’s own internal resources in order to keep costs down and to ensure that the criminal regulators are kept at bay. However, very few businesses will have internal expertise that possesses the experience and qualifications necessary to undertake a fraud investigation. More harm can be done by employing inexperienced resources to detect and recover losses from fraud. For example if a suspect is questioned inappropriately there is a strong possibility that any evidence obtained will be inadmissible in court and could lead to the organisation finding itself on the receiving end of a claim for constructive dismissal!

An answer might be using both external expertise and internal resources. By utilising external fraud expertise it may be possible to manage the efficient use of internal resources to conduct a fraud investigation. This means that an organisation can carry out fraud investigation and asset tracing work under the competent guidance of a fraud expert without employing expensive teams of lawyers and accountants to do the work. The expert will keep the police or other criminal regulatory authorities informed, and may even submit an investigation report to them for a subsequent criminal prosecution. The victim will need to employ appropriate legal expertise, but only when required and only those that are capable for the task of recovering assets. Unless there is a need to show investors or the outside world that a substantial “branded” investigation is being undertaken, a safe, quick and economical option for recovering assets must be to efficiently match internal resources with external expertise.

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