It was late on a dark November evening in 2002 when the corporate counsel of the Victoria Paper Corporation contacted our Chapter member Jay Magret, CFE, CIA about a suspected irregularity involving the team of Tim Clark, the world-wide maintenance manager for Victoria’s most complex automated paper manufacturing equipment.
Clark had been hired after a long exhaustive search by one of Victoria’s many employment contractors, Global Image, Inc. Clark was hired to oversee the entire maintenance program at Victoria’s plants worldwide. Victoria’s management was elated because Clark seemed ideal for the position, seemingly having spent half of his professional life providing automated systems savvy support to major paper companies around the world. He was used to working in foreign locals and had collected an array of impressive skills that enabled him to be appreciated as a through professional. Once hired, Tim requested four additional staff members for his unit, whom he said he personally knew, and contracted for through Global Image. The names and resumes of the four new staff members were subsequently provided by Grayson Employment, another job agency that also specialized in providing labor to the paper industry. Because the four new staff members were already registered in Grayson’s employee database and were explicitly requested by Tim Clark, Victoria and Global Image didn’t feel the need to complete the usual background verifications.
Such a chain of job agencies is common in the labor market: international paper companies, like companies in other industries, manage large projects in disparate, sometimes isolated locales around the globe, and they are stressed by production deadlines. Accordingly, companies find themselves continuously short on the highly specialized people who are qualified to manage and support such projects. Such international companies rely heavily on job agencies to provide contractors already skilled in the business and available to work in remote destinations.
When a business sector is booming, it becomes crowded with personnel interested in exploiting opportunity and, in the resulting complicated labor market, the temptation to cut personnel supply corners in response to tight deadlines often emerges. The result is that, with a plethora of job agencies providing labor, sometimes to a single project, the final employer sometimes doesn’t know with precision what the hourly fee paid to each individual contractor is after it is redistributed along the chain of multiple job agencies.
Under Clark’s direction, his team was charged with the ambitious task of assuring the continuous performance of maintenance activities at Victoria’s paper plants around the world. On paper, Clark’s team worked long hours each week and most weekends, sometimes flying throughout Europe and Asia with little rest. Each hour worked by a member of the maintenance team was certified and signed off on personally by Clark, on behalf of Victoria.
During their year-and-a-half of service, the four individuals hired by Tim Clark claimed to have worked an excessive number of hours, which triggered an internal review by Grayson Employment’s personnel management. During their review, personnel management found that the four employees’ employment files did not include appropriate identification documents. When the agency requested copies of their passports, the four employees immediately submitted their resignations, and soon after Clark did the same. The day after Clark resigned, Grayson contacted Victoria whose corporate counsel, alarmed, contacted our Jay Magret.
Setting to work immediately and working closely with Victoria’s auditors and the corporate counsel, Magret quickly uncovered evidence that Clark had falsified records and documents for three of the individuals on his team. It became apparent to Jay that those individuals were ghost employees; they did not exist. Clark had created fake resumes for three ghost employees, falsified contracts, signed time sheets, and forged the resignation letters. Further analysis showed that the fourth individual did indeed exist, was related to Clark, and had collaborated on the scheme. Clark and his accomplice had to work hard to carry out the duties of four employees.
Jay’s analysis also showed that Omega’s employee interviews were sometimes conducted solely by line managers involved in the hiring process, without the support of the Human Resources Department. The same line managers were then responsible for certifying the time sheets of their employees, including contractors, while their identification documents weren’t systematically collected or retained. Moreover, the contracts and procedures in use didn’t clearly establish or document each step of the selection and job assignment process.
Magret’s final report specified that the fraud was possible, and profitable, because the paper company client paid the wages of each ghost employee through the chain of job agencies and directly into the accounts of the contractors, which were registered in the name of a private company and managed by Clark. By the time Victoria realized the scope of the fraud scenario with Magret’s help, Clark and his associate had already disappeared with more than a million dollars paid to them during their year-and-a-half scheme. The paper company later discovered that even Clark was not who he claimed to be. He had used a fake identity and was untraceable, leaving little to no chance of recovery of the stolen money.
In response to management’s request that he proactively suggest controls to strengthen Victoria’s anti-fraud program, Magret suggested, as a matter of normal practice, that:
–Companies should perform time assessments to ensure they know how long a job will take to complete.
–Strict procedures should be in place during the hiring process, especially regarding segregation of duties. Human resources should always be involved in the process and responsible for checking identification documents with the physical person.
–The company should limit the opportunity for line managers to recommend hiring people they know. In some cases, it is unavoidable, so managers should always try to guarantee a higher level of segregation, especially in the authorization of time sheets.
–When using a job agency, the company should be sure that the relationship with contractors will be directly between the company itself and the agency. By doing this, the company will save money and be more assured about the contracted personnel.
— Client inhouse auditors of the personnel function should perform a periodic analysis of office records by selecting a sample of employees and verifying their effective presence in the office or on the job site, making sure appropriate identification is included in their records.
–Excessive hours claimed is as a red flag, especially when it is common among off-site employees. Establishing key performance indicators for each department or business process can serve as a reference for red flag comparisons.
–A wide-ranging and fragmented work environment can make the ghost employee phenomenon possible. A strong internal control framework and strictly enforced personnel policies are the only ways to prevent and discourage this type of fraud scheme.
