Fighting Fraud In Your Business

Worried about fraud within your company? The Washington Post has a few tips to help prevent it from happening to you.

Confirm who’s handling fraud control. “Do a quick and dirty assessment of fraud control,” Edwards said. “One of the questions I always ask [clients] is, ‘What are your responsibilities for fraud and misconduct management?’ If nobody has responsibility across a senior level, they have to establish some kind of roles and responsibilities.” It can be a working group, but someone needs to quickly identify areas that may need action.

Screen and monitor those who touch or track money. Background checks are a must for accounting workers, and division of labor is also a good idea, especially for things like who gets the mail and who deposits checks. “It’s good to have a few different people working on those things so that no single person has access or control over the entire system,” Wolfgang said. And make sure accounting workers take vacations. “If someone’s involved in fraud, they’ll be reluctant to take time off because if somebody else gets in their job for a few weeks, they’ll see that something’s going on,” she said.

Conduct basic fraud-awareness training. It can be as simple as getting employees together and explaining that fraud can occur in any organization and describing what they need to know and how they can speak up if they see something unusual. “It’s Awareness 101, and it lets employees know that you’re watching,” Edwards says. “It serves as a detection element in and of itself.”

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