This webinar will guide you through each of these critical steps, leaving you with practical "how-to" guidance for minimizing your organization's exposure to the large and growing variety of vendor schemes and collusive frauds.
Accounts Payable (AP) is the one business function that, in many organizations, is more vulnerable to fraud than any other. That is because all funds that flow out of the organization must first pass through AP. And over time, dishonest vendors have created newer and craftier methods of stealing from organizations by exploiting control weaknesses in the AP function.
Result: It is more important than ever for management to allocate professional and financial resources to eliminating these control weaknesses. This almost always starts with learning about the types of vendor-perpetrated schemes fraud that can victimize your organization. It is then necessary to determine if proper controls are already in place to prevent such crimes from occurring.
From there, internal audit plans must be adjusted to include testing for identifying the red flags of possible AP fraud. This enables management to initiate further examination of suspicious findings and ultimately to apprehend offenders and remediate control weaknesses.
Learning Objectives:
- Conduct a quick and cost-effective Fraud Risk Assessment for your payments/vendor operations
- Implement effective vendor/billing fraud detection techniques and build audit practices to detect red flags of common schemes
- Implement best-practice Anti-Fraud Control strategies for vendor fraud
- Advise management on fraud risk mitigation through transaction monitoring, technology/information technology tools and low-cost internal controls
- Recommend better anti-fraud management structure (Board of Directors/Executive Management, Line Management, Compliance, General Counsel, etc.)
Why Should You Attend:
Billing schemes are the most common type of external fraud schemes threatening most organizations.
Participants will learn how to identify varieties of vendor-related fraud schemes damaging organizations of all kinds, including small businesses and non-profits, and determine how shrewd fraudsters abuse the payment process to embezzle funds for years before being detected-and how to shorten the time before discovery.
The webinar will enable participants to quickly recognize the red flags of external as well as internal vendor fraud in your operations and financial records and will assist in providing cost-effective anti-fraud controls to protect against the growing army of real and phony vendor fraudsters.
Areas Covered
INTRODUCTION
- Statistical overview of the fraud problem
- Who commits vendor fraud
- Lessons from fraudsters
COMMON TYPES OF VENDOR FRAUD TODAY
- Billing fraud schemes
- Shell company schemes
- Vendor master file schemes
- Double billing schemes
- Internal manipulation of vendor master file
- Internal perpetration of shell company/pass-through vendor schemes
- Kickbacks/bribery
- Conflicts of interest
- P-Card fraud
RED FLAGS OF VENDOR FRAUD
- Conducting a fraud risk assessment and recognizing the red flags of vendor and collusive fraud
- The fraud risk mitigation cycle
- Implementing an organization-wide system for detecting, preventing and investigating fraud
FRAUD DETECTION
- How vendor frauds are most often detected
- Additional general detection methods
- Data mining/analytics for fraud detection
- Examples of fraud audit techniques at work
ANTI-FRAUD CONTROLS FOR VENDOR FRAUD
- Internal controls and other fraud prevention measures
- Who Should Manage Anti Fraud Activities for AP
- Internal Controls: Do's and Don't's
- General controls: segregation of duties, delegation of authority, background investigation
- Specific AP operations-level controls for foiling vendor schemes
Instructor
Peter Goldmann is President of FraudAware LLC,the publisher of White-Collar Crime Fighter, a widely read bi-monthly newsletter for internal auditors, controllers, corporate counsel, financial operations managers and investigators. The newsletter is in its 15th year of publication under Peter's leadership.
Peter is the author of Fraud in the Markets: Why it Happens and How to Fight It, published by John Wiley &Sons. The book is an in-depth account of the role that fraud played in bringing about the financial crisis of 2008. Peter is also the author of four other anti-fraud books covering accounts payable fraud, accounts receivable fraud, as well as two workbooks on fraud and cyber-risk and control, also published by Wiley.
Peter also developed FraudAware, the leading fraud and cyber-crime awareness training program. A user-friendly learning tool, FraudAware uses seminar, Webinar and E-Learning formats to train employees and managers at all levels in how to detect, prevent and report incidents of fraud, information theft and other forms of financial and electronic suspicious conduct.
FraudAware courses, which are customized for individual corporate, non-profit and government agency clients, reinforces organizations' whistleblowing programs by enabling employees to detect illegal activity that can then be reported to supervisors or managers or by using the organization's confidential hotline in accordance with established policy.
In addition, Peter has conducted numerous on-site fraud and cyber-crime detection and prevention workshops for internal auditors, attorneys, HR executives and compliance officers at Fortune 500 companies including Siemens Corp., Marriott International, Sony Denny's Corp,as well as large not-for-profit organizations. He has also been a guest lecturer for college accounting and auditing courses.
Peter has 25 years of experience as a business journalist and trainer, having launched, edited and published numerous business trade periodicals covering small business, international trade, management strategy, cyber-crime (Cyber-Crime Fighter) banking and personal finance. He is a Certified Fraud Examiner (CFE) and a member of the Editorial Advisory Committee of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE).
He has been a columnist for the ACFE's newsletter, The Fraud Examiner and is a frequent contributor to other leading industry publications on anti-fraud and cyber-crime topics. He has appeared on Fox Business News, The Wall Street Journal This Morning, The New York Times and Internal Auditor magazine.
Peter holds a Bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan and a Master's from the London School of Economics.