paulinePrivate Investigative Agency Understanding And Fighting Fraud
As the owner of a private investigations company, you can find on a practical level, fraud is much more and takes many diverse scenarios. Fraud is a loose term that is somewhat over-used within the industry, and even could be the escape-goat of other underlying problems. Often, “fraud” is a term thrown up to management to gain their attention or to make the potential problems seem worse that what they are so that bigger budgets can be obtained for the security division. The ineffectiveness of certain security functions, policies or personnel issues can often be the real underlying issue.
The term, fraud, seems to conjure up somewhat of a mystical, all encompassing catch all. Improperly labeling a situation as fraud can present legal ramifications; therefore a potential crime should not be addressed as fraud until it is precisely designated as such. In addition, close-communication with the police and district attorney’s office should be maintained to insure that the fraud investigation meets the basic criteria for successful prosecution. Under these circumstances, the Brooklyn private investigators should be careful of their terminology to prevent any possible lawsuit.
Fraud is diverse and can take place at any level of society or any level of an organization. Typically, there is internal and external fraud. Internal fraud primarily deals with employee related fraud, whereas external fraud presents itself through those outside of an organization. The apparent link between the two seems to be… the existence of circumstances which makes fraud attractive to a particular organization or circumstance.
Because there are so many types of fraud, a cheap private investigator has to be able to be versatile enough to adjust to each particular situation. The premise is the same; identify the elements of the crime, trace the leads, secure the evidence and identify the culprit. Seems easy enough until you go from investigating a computer fraud to a worker’s compensation fraud which have different elements altogether.
Different fraud situations can be prevented using several different methods. First, the client should have some sort of computer security programs in place, even if they have financial information, accounts, human resource files and product development documents on the system. The client should purchase some of-the-shelf security programs which makes employees enter codes to start up the system and different codes to get into different areas of the system. The computer main-frame, as well as each terminal is now turned off each night to help prevent access by modem. In addition, all lines, including their computer telephone line is forwarded to their answering service each night. An internal “employee satisfaction” questionnaire should also be developed in an attempt to keep abreast of employee attitude changes and supervisors. We encourage taking employees to lunch once a month to enable a rapport to be established so that employee dissatisfaction and problems can be addressed in a non-threatening work environment.
As you can see, fraud is very diverse and can easily be miss-diagnosed. The use of a good internal awareness training program, adherence to policies and practical observation can help stem fraud. For additional information on Private investigative agency and understanding and fighting fraud please visit our site at .
