Raising Fraud Awareness for all employees? A small price to pay for a full night’s sleep 

Regardless of size, sector, or location, every organisation is at risk of fraud. Goods, data and cash are all valuable, and fraudsters will go to lengths to get their hands on them. It can be difficult to recover losses once fraud has occurred. It pays, therefore, to be proactive in preventing it from happening in the first place. Educating your employees on how to spot early warning signs and any suspicious activity can go a long way to mitigating such risks.

Why is fraud awareness vital in minimising costs and losses?

As mentioned above, prevention is better than cure when it comes to fraud. It’s not always possible to recuperate losses and repairing reputational damage can take time. It’s far easier to minimise the damage if you can prevent fraud, and your frontline teams can be instrumental in this. They are in a prime position to identify unusual or suspicious circumstances that could indicate potential fraud.But they can only do that if they are educated on what to look for.

Employees who have had fraud awareness training are more likely to spot:

• weaknesses in systems or processes
• internal controls that are not being followed
• exceptions to normal business operations
• unusual behaviour or strange requests by colleagues or customers.

The goal of fraud awareness isn’t to create fraud evangelists or zealots or to make everyone suspicious of each other. It’s to encourage proactivity and participation on fraud prevention and detection and creating a culture of honesty.

If everyone in the organisation works to prevent fraud, any dedicated counter-fraud staff can focus on what they do best including the preparation of counter fraud strategies and plans and the investigation and prosecution of fraudsters.

What information do employees need to know?

There are two parts to fraud awareness. The first is getting your employees motivated to act by giving them an understanding of:

• Why it’s in the interests of the organisation to combat fraud
• Why fraud is not a victimless crime
• How the organisation is demonstrating its commitment from the top that it intends to do something about it
• How individual employees can make a difference
• What is really at stake in terms of lost revenue, additional costs and a damaged reputation
• How these losses and costs impact the organisation’s future and even the security of an individual’s employment.

When employees understand the above, they can see how fraud against the organisation can impact them personally. Once they have made that connection, they’ll be more engaged with the counter fraud strategy.  That’s where the second part comes in by providing further information on:

• The scope and extent of the risks – recent statistics from recognised sources always help
• Clear definitions of fraud and what’s different about corruption
• Differentiating internal (employee) fraud and external fraud with real-life case studies to bring such frauds to life
• Guidance on what to do if they suspect fraudulent activity.

The last point is particularly important. Employees can only act on the training if there is a clear process for reporting suspicious activity. They’ll also need to understand the do’s and don’ts – how to gather and preserve evidence, for example. Once everybody has a general awareness of fraud, there are opportunities to build on the knowledge for those who need more detailed fraud information in specific high-risk areas. This applies, for example, to fast-moving risks such as cybercrime.

The benefits of digital fraud awareness training

Traditional, face-to-face training still has its place in some circumstances, but it is very resource heavy and can be a slow and costly process. By comparison, digital learning is a quick, consistent and cost-effective way of getting quality information to large numbers of staff.

Digital learning is most effective when it includes:

• Customised content – specific to your organisation with reference to your counter fraud strategy, whistleblowing policies and reporting channels
• Exercises to test learner understanding
• Interactive content such as videos and images to maintain learner interest throughout
• Round-the-clock access to content on any device so learners can choose how and when to raise their awareness and work at their own pace
• Regular updates to ensure content remains current
• A management dashboard with information on learner completions and feedback
• The opportunity for learners to leave feedback and obtain a certificate of completion.

The key is to find the right balance between the extent of learning provided and the ability of learners to retain the knowledge. In our experience, a course duration of around 40-45 mins has proven to be the optimum timescale.

Our fraud awareness solution – Focus on Fraud Awareness – has been designed with all the above in mind and is already used by organisations across the UK. We currently have four separate Editions of the course to meet the needs of local authorities, schools and colleges, housing associations and the private sector organisations respectively.

Meritec’s sleep easy pyramid

Focus on Fraud Awareness sits at the heart of Meritec’s overall portfolio and is complemented by a range of related products in what we call the ‘Sleep Easy Pyramid’.

This covers individual, organisational and digital wellbeing, with courses on mental wellbeing, fraud awareness, cybersecurity, equality and diversity, risk management and GDPR. Many of these have also been developed for specific sectors  whilst some are supplemented with a deeper dive into subject-specific ‘spotlight’ courses.  Each course has been developed with subject matter experts to ensure quality content. Why do we call it a sleep easy pyramid? Because if you’re a senior manager and have all of these bases covered, you should find it easier to sleep at night.

Meritec can offer the secure hosting of all these products on its own Digital Learning platform. In addition, all products can be provided as SCORM-compliant files  that they can smoothly integrated with any existing LMS. We also offer an optional mobile app for harder-to-reach learners. Our pricing structure is completely transparent and extremely cost effective. This includes the option to pay a one-off set-up fee and a single monthly subscription fee to cover all your employees.

Give your teams the tools to protect your organisation from fraud and cyber crime so your managers can sleep better at night.

Please contact our friendly team for more information on our digital learning products or to book an online demo.