Forensic Accounting

Today’s competitive business climate and dynamic market environment pose numerous threats of fraud and ethics violations. With the growing global need for transparency, incidents of fraud and violation of ethics could impact businesses in their revenues and reputation. Incidents of fraud and non-compliance may include misreporting, misappropriation/theft, abuse of authority, falsification, conflict of interest, breach of contract, third-party frauds (including vendor, supplier, dealer, customer, and business partner), kickbacks, or other regulatory non-compliance.

At Nexdigm, we support businesses with strategies and measures to combat and minimize fraud, including providing a fact-based investigation report for management action. The rules adopted by us are driven by a structured fraud-control framework developed by our team of trained professionals and Certified Fraud Examiners (CFEs) with experience in forensic accounting, fraud investigations/examination, digital forensic reviews, and control reviews.

We can help gather specific evidence around ethics and compliance-related issues.

Our Services

Whistle-Blowing Policy Enhancements

• Improve policy: Formulate or improve an organization’s whistle-blowing policy in line with global best practices in order to influence genuine whistle-blowers.
• Increase awareness: Help create awareness on whistle-blowing with training sessions, periodic internal communication, ethics-related posters, etc.
• Effectiveness assessment: Code of conduct and whistle-blowing policy awareness assessment surveys and interviews to evaluate the effectiveness of the whistle-blowing mechanism.

Support in Investigating Concerns

• Investigations: Gather evidence in whistle-blower investigations or any suspected matters of policy violations, which help identify the perpetrator and quantify frauds to the extent feasible. The approach is to gather evidence from documentation, data (both ERP and other application/maintained data), digital records, and information available in the public domain. This includes forensic accounting, investigations that involve detecting fund diversions to vendors or third-party kickback investigations. In special cases, we even engage document examination experts to validate signatures or the age of the paper used for a contract.
• Digital forensics: Conduct digital forensic reviews (desktop, laptop, and mobile forensic), including imaging, extraction, and analysis of digital information from company-owned assets using the appropriate tools and technologies. The reviews will include gathering evidence including emails, user-created files, metadata, registry information, system logs, and application process data among others.
• Desktop background checks: Conduct desktop background checks for corporates and investors on the target and its promoters, including litigation searches (e.g., if convicted of bribery or another criminal offense), negative media searches, and regulatory searches (debarred entities/individuals).
• Anti-corruption compliance investigations: Assist in investigations concerning anti-corruption compliance (Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and UK Bribery Act (UKBA)).
• Pre-investment anti-corruption due diligence: Conduct anti-corruption compliance reviews on behalf of a parent company or due diligence on the target on behalf of investors based on a proprietary scoring model to enable meaningful decision-making.
• Site visit and mystery shopping: Conduct a site visit or mystery shopping to validate the existence of and gather information on a particular practice/non-compliance.

Fraud Prevention/Minimization Measures

• Fraud vulnerability assessment: Conduct vulnerability assessments of fraud risks in select processes (including red flags, vulnerabilities, and control gaps) to enable appropriate control mitigation strategies.
• Fraud risk assessment and scoring: Conduct a comprehensive fraud risk assessment of identified processes and score risks based on the current level of mitigating controls.
• Fraud analytics dashboard: Develop and deploy a rule-based fraud analytics dashboard for select processes, for periodic monitoring of control lapses. We choose tools for analytics (like IDEA Data Analysis) to analyze large volumes of data and identify select patterns/exceptions.

Setting up a Fraud Control Unit

• Developing a robust concern-handling process: Support in reviewing trends in the case of closures and actions taken to identify opportunities for enhancing the concern-handling process or investigator efficiency.
• Enhancing governance mechanism in investigations: Support in enhancing the governance mechanism in investigations with a structured framework, standard operating procedure, and communication protocols.
• Fraud reporting: Support in structuring protocols for reporting fraud and ethics violations.