Whether you are running a small business or a large one, your business is at risk of corporate fraud. The one negative about a small business is that if they are the victims of fraud, they are likely to have greater losses than larger companies. This is usually due to the fact that smaller companies have less protection than their larger counterparts. As a business, you should be investing in programs that mean that you are losing less money per year by fraud, and this should have proactive prevention, strict training and in-depth investigations.
Your employees are the people on the ground with their eyes open, and they are the most likely ones to catch unusual and suspicious behaviour. Ideally, your business should be hiring people and using security measures such as key card and identity card access into various areas of the office. Companies like jumio.com/trusted-identity/netverify can use facial recognition technology to help you to prevent people from accessing areas that they shouldn’t in the company office. This can help you to control who has access to what in your company and identify the perpetrators should fraud occur.
One of the best ways that your business can develop the right fraud prevention measures, is to use professional help. Bringing in a company to advise on how you can minimise fraudulent activity in your business is going to help you to see the gaps in your business security and minimise the incidents of fraud all around. Some of the ways that they can help are:
- Assist you with writing an employee manual to outline standards, including policies and training guides that all employees should adhere to.
- Outlining guides for reference checking and criminal history, which should include credit referencing, driving licensing and more than one reference from previous employers. You need to know about the character of the people working for you and this can help.
- Helping you to secure all your company assets and data with restricted access to specific employees. Financial tools and IT server rooms are sensitive in their information, which means that you should be ensuring only top-level management has codes for these rooms.
- It’s important to get some guidance on segregated activities. One area of your business shouldn’t just be handed to an employee to oversee, not without a second or third pair of eyes to view it, too. This can prevent payroll or financial fraud, as well as theft of important data.
- You can also be helped by drawing a schedule of random checks and surprise audits. It may be a surprise for your staff, but it won’t be for you. This can mean that people who are committing fraud in your company are kept on edge.
While there is no one company that has the strictest and best internal controls that will always prevent breaches in security, you can still try to get that for your business. The last thing that your small business needs is to be hacked into; prevent first.
