“Ex-bookkeeper arrested for stealing more than $185,000 from San Antonio homebuilder.”
You may have seen this headline in the news recently. An “ex-bookkeeper at a San Antonio homebuilder was arrested for stealing more than $185,000 from their firm.”
The bookkeeper apparently voided and reissued checks to her own bank account over the course of several months. The theft was only discovered due to financial inconsistencies that surfaced during the homebuilder's acquisition last fall.
It’s an unfortunate headline, but employee fraud scenarios like this happen with great frequency.
Why? Because most software tools... and most internal audit methods... are not designed to uncover the honest and dishonest breakdowns that cost large organizations millions of dollars annually.
Breakdowns in your controls are allowing fraud occurrences to sneak through
The breakdown in this case may have been caused by the incapacity of ERPs and present audit processes to identify personnel posing as vendors. Employees can be very creative in making invoices and vendors appear legitimate. In addition, they frequently have knowledge of internal systems that helps them to remain undetected.
In this case, the employee altered the checks by using a PDF editor listing her own bank account listed for the payee.
Our technology catches this type of fraud through a focused set of algorithms and AI-driven learning models that are doing real-time analysis on characteristics such as vendor tax IDs, vendor bank accounts, unusual transaction amounts, and several other corroborating factors that allow us to pin-point these high-risk activities as they are happening. This puts your audit team in a position to do immediate research and stop this behavior in its tracks.
Fraud is happening in your organization
A typical organization loses 5% of its revenue to fraud every year, with a median loss of $125,000, according to the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE). Fraud typically goes unnoticed for an average of 14 months, resulting in average losses of $8,300 a month.
You Can Proactively Stop Fraud Pre-Payment
Our clients protect their accounts payable expenditures using Oversight for Payables, which proactively identifies all spend risk by analyzing each invoice, payment, and vendor at every point of entry where accounts payable data is stored. Our AI-driven solution identifies the main cause of cash leakage and alerts you to suspected fraud across siloed systems in real-time, allowing you to act prior to payment.
