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IT professionals need to ramp up their anti-fraud vigilance
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14/03/2008
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Manufacturers are being warned to check that their systems won’t allow unscrupulous employees to create false audit trails, in the wake of a survey that finds 77% of IT professionals saying Enron-scale scandals could occur in the UK.
The research, by document management software company Version One, involved 70 IT directors and managers across a range of public and private sector organisations.
They said that greed, panic, lax systems and apathy are an ongoing problem. A stunning 89% stated that someone in their organisation would be able to tamper with or ‘lose’ a document to suit their ends, and 30% admitted that they had come across activity involving business documents that could be considered fraudulent – and two thirds of these stated that they’d witnessed document fraud several times.
Lynne Munns, general manager of Version One, says: “A false accounting scandal mirroring Arthur Andersen and Enron will always remain a possibility without effective preventive measures. Organisations need to carefully consider whether their current systems and processes allow unscrupulous employees to easily commit fraud by doctoring or losing documents. Organisations without solid processes and systems in place need to act before it’s too late.”
In total, 86% of the survey’s 70 respondents feel that electronic document management would help. They said that such a system would create a strong audit trail and reduce the opportunity to change data or create fictitious invoices. They also cited greater control of documents, increased security access levels to restrict tampering and an inability to lose scanned documents as important reasons for implementing such systems.
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Author
Brian Tinham
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