In a world of commercial or corporate business, fraud investigation is the need of the hour. Due to the busy environment, most of the firms tend to skip the investigation part. The corporate fraud investigators are required to help identify all activities affecting the business.
Due to a lack of general knowledge of the corporate investigation, many companies/organisations/industries fall victim to fraud, theft, and employee misconduct, not knowing where to begin investigation and where to end. Businesses cannot spend much of the time on reactive actions. While they look at the growth, they also need to spend adequate time on strengthening their foundation of ethics and compliance. Investigation is a cat and mouse game or a chicken and egg story. Any investigation is seen as cost centre, the mindset of the organisation needs to change. Investigations will only help in strengthening the foundation for the business to grow. The investigation work involves proactive work and reactive work. The proactive work can be undertaken to plug loopholes in the system by highlighting the risks and their effect to the management.
Proactive investigations
Fraud risk assessment (FRA) and fraud and risk management of processes in any organisation which is of high monetary value can be undertaken either by inhouse resources or consultants if employed to assist. Most organisations think of the immediate value addition. They also tend to calculate immediate ROI which may not be yielding but if the organisations see the long-term ROI, then each organisation will find value in what is being discussed. The main aim of any proactive work is to reduce the inherent risk and make the residual risk as small as possible by suggesting one of these ways:

• Assuming/owning risk: the organisation needs to assume such risks if the probability such occurrences is low.
• Avoiding the risk: If the mitigating measures to counter the identified threats are too expensive, then it is suggested that businesses should avoid such risks.
• Transferring the risk: Transferring such identified risks to suitable insurance organisations is recommended.
• Mitigating the risk: Where mitigation of risk is the only option, then the organisations can mitigate such risks by having preventive and detective controls in place.

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