Fraud is continuing to increase this year, in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new survey by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners.
The report found that 79 percent of anti-fraud professionals have seen an increase in the overall level of fraud as of November, compared to 77 percent in August and 68 percent in May. Thirty-eight percent of the respondents said in November the increase has been significant, compared to 34 percent in August and 25 percent in May.
Yiannis Gavrielides is the co-founder and CEO of Covve, helping professionals to grow and nurture their contact network. He actively supports entrepreneurship as a partner at Invelopment Partners.
Megan Smith's diverse career journey at SAP spans almost two decades, across multiple lines
of business: from instructional design and training to product management and, for the majority of time, in HR. She has been an HR Business Partner supporting global leaders across sales, engineering, marketing, and product support. In 2018, Megan spent six months conducting two major academic studies for SAP in partnership with Temple University: determining factors that drive innovation culture and discovering how creativity, stress, and engagement are impacted by working in the office vs at home.
Over the past five years, Megan has been deeply involved as an HR leader in SAP's acquired cloud businesses in North America, the Head of HR for SAP Canada, and in 2022 expanded her
responsibilities to assume the role of Head of HR for SAP North America. Some of Megan's focus as of late has been developing SAP's Flex Work guidelines, D&I tools to develop inclusive
leadership, managing retention in a competitive market, and leading the COVID-19 Vaccination
office entry policy.
Mike Tropeano, Senior Director, Broadridge Consulting Services, provides extensive insights into emerging technologies and trends such as digitizing operations, hyperpersonalization of customer communications, ESG and enablement of artificial intelligence and machine learning. He has a background in investment performance measurement, securities processing and operational best practices.
Cyber fraud, payment fraud (such as schemes with debit and credit cards) and identity theft are the three top fraud schemes seeing increases, according to anti-fraud professionals.
The largest increase in observed fraud was in financial statement fraud, with 7 percent more anti-fraud professionals reported seeing financial statement fraud in November, compared to August. That could be because as companies continue to see their profits drop, they feel more pressure to cook the books.
The survey also found 77 percent of anti-fraud professionals report that investigating and preventing fraud is more challenging now, while 71 percent said detecting fraud is more challenging as a result of the pandemic.
ACFE members anticipate the fraud trend will continue, even as vaccines have begun rolling out this week in the U.S. Ninety percent of the survey respondents expect a further increase in the level of fraud over the next 12 months, with 44 percent predicting the change is likely to be significant.
Nearly half (48 percent) of the organizations polled expect to increase their investments in anti-fraud technology, and 38 percent intend to raise the use of fraud-related consultants or other external resources. Budgets for anti-fraud training and professional development are experiencing a similar increase (according to 37 percent of the organizations polled), but nearly one-quarter (24 percent) anticipate a decrease in this area. The budget component most likely to see decreases is travel for anti-fraud staff, which shouldn’t be surprising given the plunging levels of air travel in general over this past year, with 38 percent of the survey respondents expecting a reduction in funds for travel in the year ahead.
