Continuous Automation of Anti-Fraud Procedures

I am being asked more and more to speak on automating anti-fraud procedures. I believe that accounts payable is the best place to start (payroll tends to be under tight management review so you can only add so many phony employees before someone figures it out) and it is why this tends to be the #1 area for discussion.

Once a data analysis review is completed in this area, it is only natural to automate this activity so that the tests run on a consistent basis....monthly or quarterly is usually sufficient.

Thoughts welcome,
Rich Lanza

2008 seems to be the year of cost recovery

In the U.S., with Sarbanes-Oxley efforts starting to slow down as it becomes more routine, companies are spending more time focusing on process improvements and more specifically, finding cash. This is especially true as the U.S. economy is slowing with other hanging issues over the economy (i.e., sub prime mortgages).

I have been spending a lot of time over the last six months focused on cash recovery (see my website http://www.findmillions.net/) and have seen more interest starting in November 2007 than ever before in this area. I urge you to consider more cost recovery efforts in your company as they are a great way to pay for your department's costs. I run a monthly free webinar on the topic if anyone is interetsed.

Is anyone else seeing this trend?

What webinars do you want to see?

What topics interest you for webinars? We at AuditSoftware.Net want to provide you with the most timely content and education related to the use of audit technology.....but need your help.

Let us know by posting comments to this blog on what webinars most interest you.

Thanks,
Rich Lanza

Best Practice Fraud Detection Methodology

I am not sure there is such a thing but I have been working recently on a best practice methodology for detecting fraud in computer systems. I started with my Proactively Detecting Fraud research (see AuditSoftware.Net Bookstore for more information) and came to a quick method that does the following:

1) Focuses on external information sources such as US Government and business directory databases.
2) Runs a variety of query reports.
3) Mines data using tools like Excel Pivot tables to find trends that may not be quickly apparent to the user.

Any thoughts here, feel free to Email me or reply to this post.

How to we pay for all of this technology....cash recovery!

In the last few weeks, I lauched a new website, Find Recovery Auditors (www.findrecoveryauditors.net) which is an offshoot of my efforts with AuditSoftware.Net.

I developed it to show everyone how to save money with technology...which is what I have been doing all my career and it has been a blast.

Check it out,
Rich

How can so many entries be analyzed?

Saw a great quote in an article on data analysis that noted to review 100,000 journal entries at a client would take close to 1,000 person days to audit.

While maybe not that large, if you think it through, most mid-sized companies have at least 5,000 journal entries and probably 250,000 lines to these entries. Without a computer, how could these be reviewed effectively from an audit or fraud detection perspective?

Food for thought and comments are welcome,
Rich Lanza

How do you know which spreadsheets to review?

Excel has permeated all of our business processes as it provides a flexible and simple-to-create development platform. However, the mini-systems built in Excel can be rife with errors given the lack of software methodology, poor security, and ease-of-change that comes with the Excel territory.

So how can you assess the risk of your entire Excel universe? You could manually open spreadsheets and asses them against a checklist of common list of risk symptoms. That process could take months to finish and, once done, all of the spreadsheets under review could have been changed….for the worse.

What’s needed is a methodology that allow you to efficiently analyze your entire Excel risk universe, and the automation to do it in minutes. Tools exist to make this happen and see the below link for more information on an upcoming learning event:

http://www.mrexcel.com/webinar.html