Fraud Auditing, Detection, and Prevention Blog

Professional Skepticism: The Power of Fraud Knowledge

In June 2021, I will be speaking at the ACFE virtual conference on the Power of Fraud Knowledge. When I speak at a conference, my process is to select a topic, prepare the presentation, and then prepare to communicate the presentation. To do a good presentation, one should never simply read the slides but rather explain them, illustrate the concepts, explain practical applications, and maintain the audience’s interest. So, why am I telling you this?

In our fraud risk registers, we have identified over 100 procurement fraud schemes and over 100 overbilling fraud schemes. When these kinds of numbers are involved the idea of finding complex fraud schemes in your core business systems may seem overwhelming. However, fraud data analytics can simplify and improve the process.

In this blog we have selected a complex corruption scheme and a complex overbilling scheme to illustrate how fraud auditing can detect even the most complex schemes. The starting point is to identify the fraud risk statement and then understand how and where the scheme can occur in your organization.

Ghost employee schemes are a common fraud scheme during which there are people on the payroll who don’t work for the company in question but do collect a salary or remuneration.

Let’s take a closer look at how you can use fraud data analytics when creating an executing an audit program for ghost employees:

Knowing where and how fraud occurs can be a crucial step towards improving your fraud detection and prevention policies, saving you or the company you are investigating a significant amount of money and time.

Here are five common fraud schemes and how to better identify them. Auditors and management may utilize knowledge of these schemes to help their teams better identify fraud as it happens by understanding key patterns in data.