Fraud & Corporate Crime: How To immediately Protect Your Organization Today

Do thoughts of how to handle fraud and corporate crime prevention keep you up at night? Perhaps they should, because annual losses from these kinds of crimes in the U.S. are estimated to lie somewhere between $426 billion and $1.7 trillion annually. That’s a vast hole for businesses and organizations like yours to plug. How can your knowledge of fraud protect your business?

Things could be worse. Indeed, white collar crime prosecutions have dropped by more than half in the last decade. While it’s fair to say that a substantial number of these kinds of crimes go unreported, there is some reason for hope. Strategies to prevent and detect criminality in the workplace have come forwards in leaps and bounds—that is, for organizations that make the effort to engage in them. 

If you’re ready to put the right protections in place and finally get a good night’s sleep, then we’re here to assist. Our dedicated team of experts in corporate crime and fraud protect organizations like yours every day from hidden internal threats. So read on for top tips from the Lauth Investigations International corporate team on how to roll out a fraud and corporate crime prevention strategy that will make all the difference.

Simple Steps for Fraud and Corporate Crime Prevention

So, how would a seasoned investigator of crimes like fraud protect their organization from unseen bad actors? These are all proactive strategies that you can enact today:

Run a Solid Background Check on All Staff

We all like to think that we can read people well, but even those of us who have been trained to read body language prefer to back up or refute our hunches with documented evidence. It’s estimated that around 78% of job seekers lie during the hiring process, and while not all of those people are going to run a scam as soon as they get a foot in the door, some will probably try, so better not to give them the opportunity in the first place. A comprehensive background check drawing on the same databases used by law enforcement agencies should do the trick.

Restrict and Control Access to Assets

We all like to imagine that the people we work alongside every day would never do us dirty. The harsh truth is that employees are far more likely to steal if they have ample opportunity and research suggests a staggering 60% will do so if they think they can get away with it.

Simple ways to remove these dark temptations include tightly controlling access to both financial and inventory assets, conducting regular cheks, and requiring dual approval for all asset transfers. The minimal numbers of fingers in the pie and everyone with an eye over their shoulder goes a long way to preventing fraud, employee theft, and embezzlement.

Get Serious on Cyber Security

Physical inventory and financial assets aren’t the only things that can drift off when left unattended. Payment information, customer data, intellectual property, and internal communications can all fall into the wrong hands when cyber security remains in the dark ages. In the digital age, we all have a corporate crime prevention obligation in the virtual world as well as the physical one. 

Eliminate Site-Specific Threats

An on-site assessment of your security hardware and protocols is a vital step in eliminating any unnecessary vulnerabilities. Without the assistance of a keen pair of eyes, many organizations get sloppy about minimizing the risks of violence in the workplace or employees running riot in areas of the premises that they shouldn’t be able to access. A violence and threat assessment will examine this area of corporate crime prevention from the angles of both internal and externally-posed risk.

Get Your Corporate Culture In Hand

Those in the know about fraud protect themselves preemptively. It’s a simple truth that disgruntled or distressed employees are far more likely to turn on the hand that feeds them. A corporate culture that has hit the skids will always serve as a breeding ground for forms of employee misconduct such as malingering, time theft, bullying, harassment, and white collar crime. 

In contrast, strengthening your corporate culture is not only key to corporate crime prevention but also the best way to drive productivity, retention, and profits. In this endeavor, the best place to start is with a Corporate Culture Audit. From there, you can map a clear path towards the kind of crime-free and collaborative workplace that’ll see you sleeping like a baby. Ready to learn more? Connect with the Lauth Corporate Investigations team today.