Managing Fraud Risk: A Practical Guide for Directors and Managers

Answers to the Quiz

Fraud Awareness Quiz – Question 7

What anti-fraud controls and techniques does your organisation currently use to prevent fraud from occurring?

This question in the Quiz asks the delegates to consider the specific anti-fraud prevention controls that their own organisation uses. It is an opportunity for them to showcase the good practices that they have developed. I have to say that the question is almost always answered poorly. Sometimes it is answered very poorly indeed.

The answers that I receive at the start of the discussion, those that are written down by delegates, almost always refer to a number of well-known preventative controls in business: segregation of duties, authorisation limits, management review and access controls. These answers are in no sense wrong – they all refer to controls that play an important part in the fight against fraud. But they are disappointing nevertheless. These are generic controls that serve a number of broad business purposes and are not fraud-specific. If the organisations represented in the room relied only on these controls to prevent fraud, then they would in all likelihood be at considerable risk.

Also, these answers seem to me to be routine, almost standard responses to the question. As such they serve to confirm something that I have mentioned earlier, namely that fraud is a risk that often does not receive the detailed analysis and evaluation that it properly merits. Certainly, there has been very little awareness ...