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Category Fraud/Crime
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South Africa – Leader of the economic crime pack

30 March 2016 Rudi Kruger, LexisNexis
Rudi Kruger, General Manager for LexisNexis’ GRC division.

Rudi Kruger, General Manager for LexisNexis’ GRC division.

One of the commonly shared struggles all companies are known to face, is acquiring the right personnel – ascertaining if the prospective employee will not only get the job done, but whether the individual has the right personality, background and professional ethic for the position.

While qualifications carry weight, forgery and faked references are a reality of the cyber-savvy times we inhabit. And once individuals are inside a company, there is still the risk of them misusing their access to company information, processes or assets.

Nowhere is this more relevant than PricewaterhouseCoopers 2016 Global Economic Crime Survey, which indicates that when it comes committing economic crimes… South Africa is ahead of the curve.

The latest edition of the biennial Global Economic Crime Survey showed the level at which this form of crime currently occurs within the country’s borders, is nearly double that of our international counterparts – both within the continent and outside of it.

Globally, 6,337 participants in 115 countries were interviewed for the analysis – 232 of which were South African-based, senior-level management from varying industry sectors. More than one third (36%) of organisations have experienced economic crime in the past 24 months, and PwC says the situation has reached “pandemic level” with in the country.

LexisNexis South Africa, which provides governance, risk and compliance solutions in addition to legal and regulatory content, agreed that company detection methods were not keeping pace with the advances in economic crime.

Be proactive

Rudi Kruger, General Manager for LexisNexis’ GRC division, said: “The PwC survey showed that almost half the incidents of serious economic crimes were perpetrated by internal parties and that regulatory compliance is often an added source of stress and burden to companies. Yet it is essential to adopt a proactive rather than passive approach to protecting your business, because the costs of economic crime can be catastrophic, especially for small to medium sized businesses.”

In fact the financial cost of each fraud is on the rise. Globally asset misappropriation was the most pervasive form of economic crime, at 64%, followed by cybercrime which jumped from 24% in the 2014 survey to 32% in the 2016 report. Bribery and corruption was slightly down from 27% to 24% globally, procurement fraud was at 23%, human resource fraud at 12% and money laundering at 11%.

Kruger said human resource fraud had flourished within South Africa, particularly qualifications fraud.

“Our own RefCheck data shows qualifications fraud is the biggest HR fraud concern. A quarter of all matric certificates cannot be confirmed by us. One in 15 tertiary qualifications could not be confirmed due to invalid data, incomplete courses or no record of candidate. A third of all global qualifications checked through Refcheck Advanced could not be verified,” he said.
In the PwC survey more than two thirds of those who reported human resources fraud attributed this to false qualifications being submitted by potential employees.

Surprisingly, the survey revealed 22% of organisations worldwide have not carried out a fraud-risk assessment over a period of two years.

LexisNexis GRC takes the hassle out of these processes, by offering automated online tools to protect businesses not only from hiring the wrong people, but also to identify and prevent fraud schemes among existing employees.

ProcureCheck assists with:

• combating corruption by identifying potential connections and ownership of property
• identifying possible fraudulent activity within vendors and employees with the help of South African Fraud Prevention Services
• recognising conflicts of interest within your organisation and potential supply chain partners,
• investigating negative and positive news on vendors and employees to assist in mitigating reputational risk,
• highlighting business interests of employees within your organisation.

RefCheck Advanced:

• helps to automate the hiring process while ensuring a candidate meets a company’s employment standards
• offers services including verification of tertiary and secondary academic qualifications held by the individual from registered local and international institutions;
• Confirms identity and South African citizenship, as well as permanent residency and work permits;
• Provides fraud history checks via the South African Fraud Prevention Services;
• Conducts credit history checks through detailed TransUnion, Experian and XDS credit bureau reports;
• Verifies criminal history via AFISwitch (electronic fingerprint collection and processing); and much more.

Lexis Diligence enables you to:

• comply with anti money laundering (AML) requirements and protect your business
• conduct comprehensive checks on individuals, directors and companies
• screen clients against international sanction, watch and Politically Exposed Persons (PEP) lists
• verify the identity of clients globally
• uncover negative press coverage from over 23,000 sources
• find out everything you need to know about individuals and businesses.

Quick Polls

QUESTION

The South African authorities are hard at work to ensure the country is removed from the global Financial Action Task Force grey-list by February or June 2025. What do you think about their ongoing efforts?

ANSWER

But what about the BRICS?
Compliance burden remains, grey-list or not.
End-2025 exit is too optimistic.
Grey-list is the new normal.
Too little, too late.
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