Fraud has not gone away! PWC has released a very interesting report noting the prevalence of fraud still, and some excellent preventive ideas. You can access the report here.
Surveying over 5000 respondents across 99 different territories, the survey has some very interesting findings, for example:
- 47% or respondents have experienced fraud in the past 24 months
- On average companies experienced 6 incidents in the last 24 months
In identifying the types of fraud, the top 4 are:
- Customer fraud
- Cybercrime
- Asset misappropriation
- Bribery and corruption
The perpetrators were pretty evenly split between external and internal people. Customers were the biggest group of external perpetrators, and middle management the biggest of the internal. Interestingly one third of all respondents had either been asked to pay a bribe, or lost an opportunity to a competitor who they believed had paid a bribe.
When it comes to prevention, the survey revealed that six in ten organisations don’t have a programme to address bribery and corruption risk. The three most effective actions to put in place to address the risk of fraud are:
- Identify, rank, and address all your risks
- Back-up your technology with the right governance, expertise, and monitoring
- Take notice
The report includes some excellent advice regarding preventing risk, and dealing with the consequences of fraud. It is well worth accessing to see how exposed your organisation might be,