Countering Fraud for Competitive Advantage: The Professional Approach to Reducing the Last Great Hidden Cost

6

Creating an Anti-Fraud Culture and Preventing Fraud

6.1 INTRODUCTION

In the next chapter the costs of investigating fraud will be shown to be very expensive, whether an organisation has the capacity to do so, or it has to hire external expertise. The most cost effective way to deal with fraud is to prevent it happening in the first place. As Chapter 3 illustrated, fraud often occurs because there are opportunities for fraudsters to exploit. Cut off the opportunities and fraud can be prevented. Much can also be done to change attitudes towards fraud and corruption, so that it is not tolerated and employees actively look to participate in the fight against fraud. There are a wide variety of tools which can be used by the counter-fraud professional to prevent fraud. Unfortunately, for many organisations prevention will be viewed as ‘financial controls’. These are important, but they are only part of the range of strategies which can be used. There are a variety of measures which can be utilised to create an anti-fraud culture, as there are tools which can be implemented to reduce the opportunities for fraud – so-called situational crime prevention. These strategies will be explored in this chapter.

6.2 SITUATIONAL MEASURES

In Chapter 3 we found that all fraudsters, whether career, occasional or fallen, exploit opportunities to commit frauds. The latter will actively seek them out and may engage in additional conduct to create opportunities as well. Therefore reducing the opportunities ...