PI agrees more checks needed on employees
New Zealand businesses need more thorough checks on prospective employees, according to a recent survey.
The KPMG survey found more than half of New Zealand companies had been ripped off by insiders, prompting the victims to develop a profile of the average fraudster.
That fraudster is a thirty-eight-year-old trusted employee who has worked for his victims for five years. He has no known history of dishonesty and is walking away with almost half a million dollars because his bosses didn’t do their homework.
“Organisations aren’t looking at who they’re employing. This survey showed that 14% of frauds were committed by people with prior criminal history - that’s double from the 2004 survey,” says Mark Leishman, a Forensic Director at KPMG.
Fifty three percent of businesses said they were victims of fraud with an average loss of $479,000. Most fraudsters were driven by simple greed, followed by personal financial pressures and then opportunism and gambling.
“It’s often the way that it’s the most trusted, and I use that word in quotation marks, employee who turns out to be the worst offender,” says Private Investigator Trevor Morley.
Private investigators are urging businesses to check out potential employees before it’s too late. An Auckland fraud case highlighting the availability of fictitious university qualifications.
“They’ve got to find out what the person’s criminal convictions are if any, their traffic convictions and their credit worthiness because those are three things about a person’s character absolutely vital to their employment,” says Morley.
Private eyes recommend employers always take legal action when they suspect fraud, but many companies don’t. And the cost of fraud is high: in four out of ten cases none of the company’s money or goods were recovered.