Fraud Prevention & Internal Controls

The best scenario when it comes to fraud is prevention and deterrence. Properly designed internal controls are the primary defense against employee theft and embezzlement. Establishing and maintaining sound and practical internal controls for any company, organization or governmental agency ensures that every transaction is properly authorized, approved, recorded, documented and reflected within financial statements and reports.

Focusing mainly on theft and embezzlement, any organization’s internal controls, financial policies and accounting procedures can fall victim to the deliberate acts of an employee, resulting in substantial loss to the organization.

With thirty years of experience in selecting, implementing, documenting, and evaluating internal control systems in a wide variety and sizes of organizations, we can proactively assist your organization by objectively reviewing your current systems of internal controls, financial policies and accounting procedures. Our experience includes closely held businesses and not-for-profit organizations, with a major emphasis on small to mid-size healthcare practices. Having investigated many employee embezzlements perpetrated against physicians and dentists, we strongly believe medical practices remain a primary target of embezzling employees.

Our internal control assessment engagements include the following and more:

  • Segregation of duties even with fewer resources and less capacity due to today’s economic climate
  • Individualized plans to design and execute practical internal control recommendations based on your specific organization’s resources and systems
  • Preventive measures based on identified opportunities for unauthorized or fraudulent activity
  • Detection measures to identify potentially unauthorized or fraudulent transactions as early as possible
  • Review and discussion of your organization’s employee crime or dishonesty insurance policy

The end result will not yield a “fraud-proof” system of internal controls, as no system can guarantee absolute assurance that fraud will not occur, but rather should provide the organization’s owners, management and board members with a road map of where opportunities exist as well as practical recommendations to address each area.