Investigation Audit Services
if you want to safeguard your business from any kind of money fraud, a professional investigation audit is the answer
Investigation Audit Services in UAE
Little do you know your business could be taken for a ride by someone you trusted! Doing business in Dubai is easy but unfortunately, easier is to fall prey to fraud regardless of how efficiently your employees are trained to detect such shady activities in advance, how highly insulated your system is against financial crimes or how stringent the laws are against them in the country you are operating from. In the hi-tech and hyperconnected world, fraud can happen anytime anywhere. And it can harm your business significantly before you know it. Adam Global is your place to seek support regarding the same. Standing the test of time for the last two decades, we take pride in writing myriad successful business stories to tell. From business inception to business expansion to everything in between, we are equipped with qualified professionals with hands-on experience in the field and the latest tools and techniques to help businesses of any type and size in the UAE. The vast array of our business advisory and support services includes all sorts of statutory and internal auditing services as well as governance, risk, and compliance support services. And fraud investigation is no exception.
Investigation Audit: Introduction
It is quintessential for businesses to periodically audit their books of accounts. When a company suspects any sort of strange activities (such as money laundering, financial crimes, or fraud) happening in the business, a thorough investigation of its accounts, financial statements and business procedures is required. This investigation process is known as the investigative audit. Oriented to a smorgasbord of purposes, these investigation audits are conducted using various techniques and procedures to verify the existence of monetary inconsistencies, alleged disparities in tasks, or unlawful employment of assets or other firm assets. Investigative auditing is performed by a proficient investigative auditor. The procedures involved in investigation auditing are:
Investigation Audit: Importance
The first and foremost reason to conduct an investigation audit is you don’t want to put your hard-earned reputation at stake. It’s not you who conducted the fraud but it’s very much you who is going to lose the trust of your customers and stakeholders in your business. There are several other reasons as well behind investigating business upsets. An organisation might be required to do so by law, their own company standards or the public or shareholders could also expect it from a company they have invested in. No matter what the motivation is, the prime goal of conducting an investigative audit is to determine why the incident occurred, who did it, how to deal with the consequences and what are ways to withhold such activities in future.
Investigation Audit: Related Procedures
The fraud investigation process should be conducted with utmost care. The assumption acts as the foundation for the inquiry. This assumption should not harm the investigation’s goal. Better if you could hire experts from outside. The process majorly involves four stages and procedures. Here’s the scoop on them:
The process starts with determining the client’s requirements. The auditor you hire Interpret the client’s instructions up to the hilt and note down word by word the nature, scope and objective behind conducting the investigation process. In the absence of clear directions, the process might cause misunderstandings and complications. The investigator should know the area, purpose and period to be investigated.
An investigation plan cannot be carved in stone as the auditor has to finetune their investigation techniques and methods at each level depending on the various events occurring during the course of the investigation. The discoveries of one step might decide the nature of the next step. The sphere and perimeter of the investigative program should already be decided when the plan was in the development phase. Subsequently, the auditor comes up with a checklist of documents and records to be vetted by keeping the investigation’s goals in view.
At this stage, all the records & reports, as well as the personnel involved in the inquiry are thoroughly investigated by the investigator you hire. They may opt for a different route of investigation at each stage basis the circumstances and varied findings. Furthermore, the investigator keeps a detailed record of all work done, the evidence scrutinised, important discussions had, and anything supporting their findings as proof of the investigation and finally compiles an investigation report piecing the puzzles together.
This is the last stage of the investigation process where the investigator draws a conclusion using all their observations and pieces of evidence and proof gathered during the analysis of all the relevant paperwork, statements and records. The investigation report may be written by the investigator with an open mind without any preconceived notions. A typical investigation report may include:
The objective and scope of the investigation
The time span of the examination
The scope of the investigation in accord with the client’s written instructions
The investigator’s several restrictions that may have a significant impact on the conclusions made
Headers, subheadings, charts, graphs and other visual aids
The jargon-free detailed and concise conclusion drew by the investigator written in a way that even a layman can understand
The underlying records and data in the form of appendices
Adam Global: Your Investigation Auditor in UAE
An investigative audit is what the doctor ordered to with any business upsets. And to ensure the investigation audit is conducted in a detailed and accurate manner, it is highly advisable to engage one of the best professional investigation audit service providers in UAE. A quality investigative audit in UAE helps companies detect wrongdoings along with the people involved in it so they can take appropriate actions to combat the mishaps and bad implications in the long run proactively. These actions could be anything from restoring lost assets to punishing the offenders to reducing the consequent reputational or financial harm. Therefore, if you suspect any fraud, misconduct, or malpractice happening in your company and are looking for providers of outstanding investigation auditing services in the UAE do not hesitate to get in touch with Adam Global. Our experienced investigation auditors bend over backwards to figure out what went wrong, who is/are behind it, what gave rise to the incident/s, what are the flaws in your current system, how could the wrongdoer manage to keep it hidden and what preventive measures must be taken to stop it from happening again.
FAQ
Both the processes involve reviewing the book of accounts of the auditee and reporting on it. However, there is a huge difference between the two. Allow us to explain how auditing is different from the investigation:
Nature: While an audit is a general investigation, a fraud investigation is a detailed examination conducted to uncover a specific truth or fact about the auditee.
Scope: An auditor is tasked to form an opinion on the financial report, an investigator conversely seeks to respond to the questions in the engagement letter.
Frequency: Unlike audit which is conducted annually, fraud investigation is conducted ONLY when the need arises.
Evidence: The evidence for an audit is of persuasive character, on the other hand, the same in the case of a fraud investigation is unambiguous.
Auditor: Audit can be conducted by professional financial auditors (Chartered Accountants) but to perform a fraud investigation one needs to hire an expert.
Benefits: Audits can advantage businesses by verifying that their records are accurate and ensuring they are on the right track to accomplishing their goals. An audit also can point out red flags where fraud may have been committed but is not designed to root out every instance of fraud. Auditors aid companies to spot material misstatements in the company’s financial statements caused by either fraud or error. Fraud investigation, on the contrary, helps companies to identify fraud, fraudster, motive, reasons, loopholes in the system, potential harms in its wake and finally ways to prevent similar frauds from happening again in the company.
Obligation: Annual audits are mandatory; fraud investigations are not. The latter comes into the picture as a need of the hour.
Appointment: An auditor is appointed by shareholders of the auditee company to conduct a routine check on financial transactions while an investigator is hired by either management, investor or a third party to analyse potential fraud indicators and the impact of current fraud trends and make recommendations as to appropriate mitigation.
An in-depth examination of records and enquiry into the situation of the business or for a particular cause is termed as investigation in an audit. A fraud investigation audit is conducted to find out the fraudulent activity (if any) and the exact depth of committed fraud along with the areas affected by it. The investigator also identifies the loopholes or gaps that acted as a gateway for the perpetrator to commit the fraud. It is necessary to figure out the weaknesses in the system that tempt the wrongdoers to get involved in negative activities and fix them right away to suppress such instances from reoccurring in the future.
Investigative auditors utilize their skills and experience to gather evidence regarding fraudulent or abusive activity affecting governmental entities. Their audits are structured to discover and discourage the misappropriation of public assets and mitigate future fraud risks.
A 6-step, structured approach to an incident investigation is used to ensure that everything in connection with the fraud has been taken care of.
Take immediate action: Sooner the better! Take perishable evidence in custody as soon as possible. These can be CCTV footage, samples. Also do not delay in making the area safe, preserving the scene and notifying relevant parties.
Formulate the investigation plan: This step revolves around the details about the resources and people involved, the duration of the investigation, the degree of the crime and the size of the team of investigators required to handle it systematically and completely.
Gather the data: This step focuses on collecting as much information as possible from numerous sources such as various equipment, documents and the scene of the incident and people engaged in the event including the witnesses.
Conduct root & cause analysis: Failures and mistakes don’t just happen by themselves; organisations allow error-enforcing environments that promote direct causes to develop and persist. The current incident could be the result of a chain of events. Therefore, understanding the sequence of events becomes crucial to solving the riddle. At this step the investigator zeros on finding out the root and underlying causes, as well as the direct causes before identifying why the incident happened.
Initiate corrective measures only: The corrective actions should not be taken looking at the direct causes only aiming for a quick fix, putting last-lines-of-defence back in place. Rather the root and underlying causes must be considered while designing the defence mechanism. This practice will not only help the organisation lower down the risk of recurrence of the incident but also reduce the possibility of occurrence of other dissimilar incidents springing from the same, common root cause.
Prepare a report: The investigation draws to a close when all outstanding issues have been shut and the discoveries have been intimated so that lessons can be shared. The results can be communicated by means of formal incident investigation reports, alerts, presentations and meeting topics.
Fraud investigation today is no less than finding the needle in the haystack. Thanks to various tools and techniques that help investigators to deliver substantial analysis and insights quickly and cost-effectively! Checklists, proformas and posters are amongst the popular ones, particularly when setting terms of reference, collecting and structuring information, analysing causes, etc. Artificial intelligence (AI)-driven data processing technology, document review technology, automated online data research and extraction applications, analytic libraries, data visualization are some of the other wonderful techniques often used to advance investigations while minimizing cost.
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