In the past 24 months, 49% of companies worldwide have been affected by financial and economic fraud. This is the conclusion of a survey carried out by PwC in 2018 among 7,200 respondents from 123 countries, including the Netherlands. This percentage may be much higher because not all cases of fraud are reported.
Fraud in Microsoft Dynamics: "It was so simple"
In a number of cases, fraud is committed by the company's own staff. These are often employees of the finance department or people in senior positions with rights to financial data. In a smart way, money is transferred to accounts over which they have direct or indirect control.
What starts with relatively small amounts can quickly rise to transactions with large amounts. As long as amounts do not become too high and no one asks questions or has suspicions, such activities can continue undisturbed.
When fraud is detected and the person concerned is asked why the fraud was committed, the answer is often given that it was so simple. The fraudsters, for example, accidentally made a small accounting error and noticed that no one was asking questions about it.
Alertness is the key
But why is it so easy to commit fraud? This can be due to the following reasons:
- Purchasing process is not transparent and systematic
- Lack of controls
- Lack of knowledge of system possibilities (e.g. document approval in Dynamics NAV)
- Several employees have access to telebanking
- No control instruments
- No internal control of deviation procedure
- No segregation of duties between purchaser and debtor administration
- Four eyes principle is not applied
- Absence of evaluations of the purchasing process
We can conclude from this that sufficient alertness would have helped to mitigate these risks or that fraud would at least have been detected earlier or in time before actual money is transferred or data is damaged or inaccessible.
Prevention is the key
Every organization wants to prevent fraud. But this can never be completely ruled out; the human factor still plays an important role. By acting proactively, you can reduce the risks or errors of fraud to a minimum.
As u user of a Dynamics NAV / Dynamics 365 Business Central application, there are a number of things you need to take into account. We have listed these for you in a checklist. Use this checklist to assess if your own Dynamics environment is secured enough to prevent the risks of fraud. Are you well prepared or do you have to take measures?
Fill in your details below and immediately receive the checklist by e-mail.