Planning and Conducting Formal Investigations cheat sheet

Introduction to planning and conducting investigations

• A fraud or corruption investigation sets out to establish whether fraud occurred, identify who was responsible and how the scheme worked, quantify the loss, gather admissible evidence, and support asset recovery and prevention.
• It looks backward, establishing what happened for accountability and evidence, and forward, informing control improvements; the two functions must be balanced, not treated as afterthoughts.
• A fraud investigation is broader than forensic accounting or a forensic audit: it uses both, and also extends to interviewing, digital forensics and asset tracing.
• The methodology runs predication, fraud theory, evidence collection, analysis and corroboration, then reporting; predication needs only a reasonable basis to believe fraud has occurred or will occur, not proof.
• A fraud response plan, prepared before any allegation arises, sets out who is notified, who leads, how evidence is preserved and when law enforcement or regulators are engaged.