Having been forced to face the difficulties that come with investigating fraudulent activity within your organization, there are a few important decisions that must be made before your investigation can get underway. The biggest question to answer here is whether or not to turn over the investigation to a team of your own employees or to hire an external team of consultants to take on the job. While keeping the investigation an entirely internal matter may simplify issues of payment and organizational understanding, the broader benefits of bringing in external help tends to be the popular option among companies dealing with such decisions.
Perhaps the most obvious initial concern to address when hiring a team of external consultants is the issue of cost. When negotiating fees with an external organization, keep in mind that, though the team in question will be running the investigation, the executive officers and/or board of directors of your company will have a say in how things should be run, mostly with regard to the issues of time and money constraints and the obvious goal of having the investigation conducted in a swift and efficient manner. Keep in mind that the size of the project should not be paralleled to the size of the fees paid, nor should the issue of payment be approached as an open-ended agreement in which fees are merely a direct correlation to time spent, with no foreseeable end in sight. Instead, an ideal consulting team is one which takes the time to carefully analyze the situation before hand in order to offer a reasonably calculated set of fees for the work they will be doing. Also keep in mind to try and avoid proposing capped budgets, as most consultants will be disinclined to accept such an offer. The most ideal is arrangement for both parties tends to be one which provides a flat fee for each stage of the investigation, as this provides a cost framework while still allowing for further negotiation should such become necessary.
Before the investigation gets under way, a good investigative team will develop a rough outline around which they can then structure the scope the investigation. This should allow the consulting team to begin their line of inquiry by targeting the key areas most affected by the fraudulent activity, and work outward, adjusting the investigation as necessary to explore the full scope of the problem. Here however, lies another issue that will likely come up as a concern of the board and executives, being a question of the timeframe of the investigation. It is important for the executive members of your organization to understand in advance that in order to be effective, an investigation must be both thorough and concise, and while this does not mean that it should be slow, it does mean that the process cannot be rushed. A quality team of consultants will know just how to balance time and efficiency to get the job done in an efficient manner.
Lastly, in order for this arrangement to work effectively it is necessary to develop a sense of trust for those that will be working for you. If you have taken the time to carefully select a quality team of consultants, then when it comes to it, trust them to have the skills necessary to get the job done without having to peek over their shoulders and get in their way through each step of the investigation. Taking the time beforehand to select the best possible consulting team to aid in your investigation can be the key to solving any compliance failures and fraudulent activity cases that you may be forced to face.
Published by Conselium Executive Search, the global leader in compliance search.
