Managing Fraud Risk: A Practical Guide for Directors and Managers

Fraud Investigations – Practical Examples

The people who I have interviewed for this book are business men and women, they are not fraud experts. However, they have all encountered fraud within their organisations at some point in their careers and have had to deal with it. Set out below are extracts from three of the interviews. In the first, Frazer talks about how his organisation handles the investigation process itself and then Bernard and Charles provide overviews of some of the fraud cases that they have encountered.

Frazer is a senior manager in one of the UK's public sector departments. During our interview the discussion moved on to how his department dealt with fraud cases and I asked him whether the investigations were always carried out by internal staff. This is his reply:

Yes, and this is interesting. Fraud investigations here always have been carried out by internal people. In some respects they might have been carried out by the wrong internal people and I think possibly the choice of investigator has been more around “who is available?” than who was necessarily the appropriate person. So what we are doing, and again this is in progress, we are developing a pool of investigators based on people we know who have carried out investigations in the past, who did it well. We're making sure that they are appropriately briefed and trained but without sending them all on long training courses, we need to get some proportionality here.

But what we are setting up is ... ...