A corporate investigator is an actor in a corporate environment hired to identify suspicious behaviour, fraudulent activity, and instances of misconduct. While a private investigator specializes in personal affairs, a corporate investigator is an expert in how corporations are designed to function and is skilled at identifying where there are discrepancies.
Here is some information to know about what a corporate investigator is:
1. Why A Corporate Investigator is Needed
It is estimated that as many as three out of every four employees steel from their workplace. The prevalence of these crimes is why a corporate investigator should be essential a corporate investigation. The average corporation will lose five percent of their annual revenues strictly from fraud and subsequent litigation.
Billions of dollars are spent every year on fraud. A private investigator Toronto is there to eliminate and curtail fraud, embezzlement, and misconduct, and they can do so effectively and quickly.
2. List of Things A Corporate Investigator Can Help With
In finding and recovering evidence for a wide variety of corporate issues, common ways a corporate investigator can be used are not only with fraud but also breach of contract, data theft, data misappropriation, wrongful termination, sexual harassment, embezzlement, and trade secret misappropriation.
3. How to Use An Investigator to Protect Against Fraud
A corporate investigator protects a corporation from fraud through corporate profiling, participating in due diligence, corporate business analysis, intellectual property infringement investigation, and completing asset tracing.
A corporate investigator also helps with conducting security risk analysis, completing record research investigations, evaluating employee integrity, doing counter-surveillance, and handling pre-employment screening.
4. Benefits of a Corporate Investigator
What you can expect to receive with a corporate investigation is evidence, either of a crime or the lack thereof. The work from corporate investigations has been directly tied with financial savings, and survivability of an organization following fraud.
In addition, other benefits may include the ability to prosecute, and the retainment of a team, workforce, or management stakeholder.
5. The Legality of a Corporate Investigator
Corporate investigators aren’t doing anything illegal. They use legal means of uncovering and gathering information that may be admissible in court. A corporate investigator is an expert at what they do. To this point, there are specialties in the investigator world. Some may be skilled analyzing sexual harassment issues while others may have built their reputations off evaluating overseas operations. There are, of course, many investigators with multiple specialties and a better-rounded skillset.
6. A Reactive v. Proactive Approach to Investigations
A corporate investigator can be hired either reactively or as a proactive measure. These investigations are carried out in the aftermath of a crime being committed or to conclude definitively whether a crime has been committed and if criminal proceedings are a possibility.
7. What the Parameters of Corporate Investigations Are
The exact details of what a corporate investigation should entail varies contract by contract. There are standard corporate monitoring services, i.e. monitoring Internet use. There’s also auditing services ensuring operations and procedures fit to a defined expectation. One might evaluate the competition or the marketplace. They can be hired for a specific time frame or kept on retainer. An investigator may also be sent to multiple locations for the purposes of an investigation.
8. Corporate Investigators Aren’t Just for Internal Operations
Though we inherently associate corporate investigations with internal theft and fraud, investigations can be launched in response to anything from due diligence on shareholders or business partners to evaluating a company for a potential merger and/or acquisition. These investigations are being increasingly relied upon to provide actionable data to stakeholders in-charge.
9. Letting Employees Know About A Corporate Investigation
It is not appropriate or advisable to provide employees with specifics regarding a corporate investigation, however, it is alright to share the information that one is being conducted. Particularly if interviews need to be had or there is ongoing private monitoring happening, employees can be made aware. That said, depending on the jurisdiction, in some cases an employee is not legally required to know that they are being investigated. Therefore, it is up to the employer to decide how to handle the subject.
10. The Educational Background of A Corporate Investigator
There is no single path to becoming a corporate investigator. At least a Bachelor’s Degree in a business or accounting field is preferred. Most investigators in corporate settings began as accountants. If an investigator has no formal training in any sort of fraud-related capacity, it doesn’t mean they aren’t worth hiring. An investigator builds their reputation off experience, knowledge of corporate structure, and business practices.
11. What it Takes to Make A Good Corporate Investigator
A corporate investigator is always updating their knowledge and upgrading their skillset. Corporate structures never change, however, aspects of operations do. Particularly with cyber-criminal activity, digital copyright infringement, and cyber security, these aspects of running a corporation have changed tremendously over the past decade – even in the last few years! Investigations have to accommodate these changes and know where and what to look for.
12. How to Hire A Corporate Investigator
If you are interested in hiring a corporate investigator, how to hire is based off resume and experience. A recent study analyzing the market suggests that the number of corporate investigators in North America has nearly doubled since a decade ago. There are a lot of newcomers in the field and to this point, experience matters and results count.
