Vendor Fraud - How to Prevent Them for Large scale Companies

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.

This webinar will guide you through each of the 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.

This 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.

Learning Objectives:

Participants will be able to:

• 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.)

Areas Covered in the Webinar:

• 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
• 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: Dos and Don’ts
• General controls: Segregation of duties, delegation of authority, background investigation
• Specific AP Operations-level controls for foiling vendor schemes.

Who Will Benefit:

• Internal and external audit professionals
• Purchasing/procurement managers and staff
• Accounting and audit practitioners
• AP managers
• Senior financial management seeking to reduce their vulnerability to costly frauds
• Compliance and ethics managers
• CFO’s/senior financial managers
• Security personnel

Peter Goldmann
President, White-Collar Crime 101 LLC

Peter Goldmann 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, 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) as well as an active member of the Institute of Internal Auditors, the High-Tech Crime Investigation Association and the IOFM Controller Certification Advisory Board.

Mr. Goldman is a regular columnist for the ACFE’s newsletter, The Fraud Examiner and is a frequent contributor to other leading industry publications on anti-fraud topics. He has appeared on Fox Business News, The Wall Street Journal This Morning, The New York Times and Internal Auditor magazine. Mr. Goldman is president of White-Collar Crime 101 LLC, the publisher of White-Collar Crime Fighter, a widely read monthly newsletter for internal auditors, controllers, corporate counsel, financial operations managers and fraud investigators. He is the author of "Fraud in the Markets: Why it Happens and How to Fight It", published by John Wiley & Sons, as well as four other anti-fraud books. He has also developed Fraud Aware, a leading fraud awareness training program.

Topic Background:

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.

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.

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