theinnerauditor

I was reading last week on LinkedIn about a large, highly regulated, financial institution that was defrauded over a long period of time by two different companies, both of which where its suppliers. To add insult to injury, subsequent investigation by a CFE revealed that the two vendors were subsidiaries of a third, which proved also to be a supplier of the victim concern; all three cooperated in the fraud and our victim was completely unaware prior to the investigation of any relationship between them; the kind of ignorance that can draw intense regulatory attention.

This is not as uncommon an occurrence as many might think but it is illustrative of the fact that today’s companies are increasingly forced to expend resources simply trying to understand and manage the complex web of relationships that exist between them and the organizations and people with which they deal; that is, if they want to avoid falling victim to frauds running the whole gamut from the simple to the complex. Such efforts involve gaining perspective on individual vendors and customers but extend far beyond that to include sorting through and classifying corporate hierarchies and complex business-to-business relationships involving partners, suppliers, distributors, resellers, contacts, regulators and employees.

These complex, sometimes overlapping, relationships are only exacerbated by dynamic geographic and cross-channel coordination requirements, and multiple products and customer accounts (our victim financial organization operates in three countries and has over 4,000 employees and hundreds of vendors). No fraud prevention program can be immune in the face of these challenges.

Financial companies that want to securely deliver the best experience to their stakeholders within intensified regulatory constraints need to provide themselves with a complete picture of all the critical parties in their relationships at the various points of service in the on-going process of company operations. The ability to do this requires that organizations have a better understanding of the complicated hierarchies and relationships that exist between them and their stakeholders. You cannot manage what you cannot see and you certainly cannot adequately protect it against fraud, waste and abuse.

The active study of organizational hierarchies and relationships (and their related fraud vulnerabilities) is a way of developing an integrated view of the relationship of risk among cooperating entities such as our CFE client companies between their affiliates, customers and partners, across multiple channels, geographies or applications. The identification of organizational relationships can help our client companies clearly and consistently understand how each of their affiliates, business divisions and contacts within a single multi-national enterprise fit within a broader, multidimensional context. Advanced organizational management approaches can help organizations track when key people change jobs within and between their related affiliates, vendors and companies. Advanced systems can also identify these individuals’ replacements feeding a database of who is where, vital to shifting patterns of enterprise risk.

Our client financial companies that take the time to identify and document their organizational relationships and place stakeholders into a wider hierarchical context realize a broad range of fraud, waste and abuse prevention related benefits, including:

• Enhanced ability to document regulatory compliance;
• More secure financial customer experiences, leading to enhanced reputation, increased loyalty and top-line growth;
• More confident financial reporting and more accurate revenue tracking;
• Reduction of over-all enterprise fraud risk;
• More accurate vetting of potential vendors and suppliers;
• More secure sales territory and partner program management;
• Improved security program compliance management;
• More accurate and effective fraud risk evaluation and mitigation.

The ability to place stakeholders within hierarchical context is invaluable to helping companies optimize business processes, enhance customer relationships and achieve enterprise-wide objectives like fraud prevention and mitigation. Organizations armed with the understanding provided by documented relationship contexts can improve revenues, decrease costs, meet compliance requirements, mitigate risk while realizing many other benefits.

As with our victimized financial enterprise, a company without relational data regarding vendors and other stakeholders can be unknowingly dealing with multiple suppliers who are, in fact, subsidiaries of the same enterprise, causing the company to not only inadvertently misrepresent its vendor base but, even more importantly, increase its vulnerability to fraud. Understanding the true relational context of an individual supplier may allow a company to identify areas of that vendor’s organization that represents enhanced internal control weakness or fraud risk. Conversely, an organization may fail to treat certain weakly controlled stakeholders strategically because the organization is unaware of just how much business it is doing with that stakeholder and its related subsidiaries and divisions.

Risk management has always been a core competency for organizations in general and for financial institutions in particular. However, integrated enterprise risk management (ERM) practices and corporate governance disciplines are now a regulatory imperative. Any institution that views corporate governance as merely a compliance exercise is missing the mark. Regulatory compliance is synonymous with the quality of the integrated ERM framework. Risk and control are virtually inseparable, like two sides of a coin, meaning that risks first must be identified and assessed, and then managed and mitigated by the implementation of a strong system of internal control. Accurate stake holder relational data is, therefore, critical to the effectiveness of the overall ERM process.

In today’s environment, the compliance onus rests with the regulated. In a regulatory environment where client enterprise ignorance of the situation in the client’s own overall enterprise is no longer a defense, responsibility for compliance now rests with the board and senior management to satisfy regulators that they have implemented a mature fraud prevention framework throughout the organization, effectively managing risk from the mailroom to the boardroom.

An integrated control framework with more integrated risk measures, both across risk types and economic and regulatory capital calculations, is warranted. Increased demands for self-attestation require elimination of fragmentation and silos in business and corporate governance, risk management, and compliance.

Compliance needs to be integrated into the organization’s ERM base fraud prevention framework, thereby making the management of regulatory risk a key part of effective overall compliance. Compliance needs to be seen as less of a function and more as an institutional state of mind, helping organizations to anticipate risk as well as to avoid it. Embedding compliance as a corporate discipline ensures that fraud prevention controls are entrenched in people’s roles and responsibilities more effectively than external regulations. The risk management function must not only address the compliance requirements of the organization but must also serve as an agent for improved decision making, loss reduction and competitive advantage within the marketplace.

Organizations can approach investments in corporate governance, relationship identification, risk management practices and regulatory compliance initiatives as one-off, isolated activities, or they can use these investments as an opportunity to strengthen and unify their risk culture, aligning best practices to protect and enhance stakeholder value. A silo-based approach to fraud prevention will not only be insufficient but will also result in compliance processes layered one upon the other, adding cost and duplication, and reducing the overall agility of our client’s business; in effect, increasing risk. This piecemeal reactive approach also leaves a gap between the processes designed to keep the organization in line with its regulatory obligations and the policies needed to protect and improve the franchise. Organizations are only as strong as their weakest components, like the links in a chain.

The ACFE tells us that people tend to identify with their positions, focusing more on what they do rather than on the purpose of it. This leads to narrowed vision on the job, resulting in a myopic sense of responsibility for the results produced when all positions interact. ln the event of risk management breakdowns or when results are below expectations, it is difficult for people to look beyond their silo. The enemy is out there syndrome, a byproduct of seeing only one’s own position, results in people quickly blaming someone or something outside themselves, including regulators, when negative events like long running frauds are revealed and retreating within the perceived safety of their fortress silo. This learning disability makes it almost impossible to detect the leverage that can be used on issues like fraud prevention and response that straddle the boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’.

However, it is particularly disconcerting that the weakest numbers by industry sector, including financial services, occur in the ACFE studies measuring organization wide accountability and people’s understanding of their accountability. My personal feeling is that much of the reason for this low score is the perpetuation of organizational silos resulting from management’s failure to adequately identify and document all of its stakeholders’ cross-organizational relationships.