Preventing and Responding to
Computer Fraud
Risk: Information technology has facilitated the
perpetration of fraud in organizations. According to
Kroll Advisory Solutions’ Annual Global Fraud Survey,
carried out by the Economist Intelligence Unit,
30 percent of companies say they are mostvulnerable to information theft. These companies cite
IT complexity as the leading cause of heightened risk
exposure.13 Those organizations that do not know how to
identify IT-related fraud, do not have policies to prevent
such fraud, and do not have plans to respond to a fraud,
are particularly vulnerable. Likewise, organizations are
at greater risk if they do not have policies to prevent
management override opportunities within financialrelated
systems. If a fraud does occur, these organizations
may not have plans in place to respond. In addition there
is a risk of misappropriation of assets by circumventing
controls and accessing bank funds including the theft of
customer lists, proprietary company information, customer
data, etc. Often, the intangible value associated with these
items is significant. If the data is stolen, the value is directly
impacted and must be written down on the balance
sheet — either when an event occurs or during the annual
impairment analysis.Risk management: To prevent and respond to fraud, a
CPA considers the fraud risks associated with information
technology, designs policies and internal controls to
mitigate such risks, and establishes policies to detect
management override abuse. If a fraud is perpetrated,
an organization is then prepared to respond. Another
preventative control is the design and implementation
of monitoring controls. These include daily flash reports
and exception reporting that should alert management
as to an error, anomaly or potential fraud. The key to an
effective monitoring control is that a responsible party is
reviewing the control and has an action plan in place in
the unlikely event that something occurs. All too often,
corporations have monitoring controls in place but an
action plan had not been implemented that would lead to
the correction and remediation of the error.