Meeting of the Minds

It’s a heart stopping, spine tingling moment. Something’s been bugging you about the books or a specific account for a while, but you never could put your finger on it. On the surface, all seems as it should be, but a little voice keeps telling you something is very wrong. And all of a sudden a bill, a phone call, a check, or a line item jumps off the page. It’s out of place; it shouldn’t be there. And that’s when the cold sweat starts. Someone in your company is siphoning off profits into their own pocket. Embezzlement. Fraud. And then that tingle turns into a burn. You go from a cold sweat to a clenched fist. No one ever wants to find a good forensic accountant for fraud investigations, but wanting and needing are one bad employee decision away.

The really unfortunate fact about corporate and financial fraud is that it hits small businesses hardest of all. Small and mid sized companies lose more money as a percentage of net income than larger ones. And the smaller you are, the more it hurts. You’re working hard to keep all of your employees paid and on the job during this economic crisis, only to suspect one or more of them of fraud – sucking money away when you need it most.

Fraud has been on the rise over the last few years. People beginning to feel desperate about their future have turned to schemes and ploys to pad their incomes, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars a year from companies in every sector. Fraud investigations are on the rise as well. But good fraud investigators don’t exactly grow on trees.

But there is hope in any embezzlement case. The quicker you act on your hunch and do a thorough fraud investigation, the sooner you can stop the bleeding. You might even be able to recoup some of your lost assets. In most cases, the white collar thief targets cash assets by augmenting wages, false billing and conflict of interest kickbacks. And that goes for both line employees and managers. There are dozens of ways to siphon cash out of the system, and you need to find out how it is happening and who is at fault as quickly as possible if you suspect fraud is taking place in your organization.

A forensic accountant will help you sort through the piles of numbers to figure out exactly how they are doing it; and, even more importantly, how much they have taken. Without this expert forensic accounting you may never know. If it bothered you for a while and you finally found one item or two instances where something is out of place, you’ll certainly want to find all the rest of them so that you can take action to prosecute and pursue every legal remedy available.

Fraud investigations can be complex. If the embezzlement took place over a period of years it’s going to take a lot of digging to find all those detailed events. Fraud investigators are specifically trained and experienced to find all of those needles in the financial haystack. They will also help you design and devise systems and balances to protect your company from future fraud vulnerability.

The minute you have one of those moments where you’re almost certain that a fraud has occurred, you need to waste no time ordering a fraud investigation so that you can know for sure. At crfa Forensic accounting, Mike Miller can guide you through the fraud investigation process with expert advice and professional fraud investigator services.

crfaforensicaccounting and Mike Miller are experts at fraud investigations. To read more about how they can help you visit crfaforensicaccounting.com