Fraud can have a substantial impact on your organization through not only financial loss, but it can also jeopardize compliance with regulations, damage morale, and affect market confidence and share value. Given that the typical organization loses 5% of revenues to fraud and that it takes on average 18 months to uncover fraudulent activities, companies should be considering ways to proactively monitor their financial transaction to expose early indicators of fraud, error, and abuse.

Challenges
There are a number of issues, however, that make effective fraud detection a particularly challenging task: extensive volumes of data, complexity and diversity of IT systems, changes in business processes, and the adaptive nature of fraud schemes. Many of the audit techniques currently in use to combat fraud come up short: sampling data leaves suspicious transactions undetected, use of spreadsheets is prone to errors, and testing of system controls leaves one vulnerable to exploitation of "gaps" between systems.

ACL Solutions
With ACL technology, you have an effective fraud detection solution with the power to create and run a comprehensive set of tests designed to detect indicators of a wide range of fraud regardless of which IT system houses the transactional data and how many records you need to analyze. With the ability to test 100 percent of transactions, your investigation will uncover all relevant anomalies – typical signs of fraud, error, or abuse. Through automation, these tests run continuously, often catching the fraud early, before the money goes out the door, making remediation easier and acting as an effective deterrent for other potential fraudsters.

Fraud Detection in Action
The majority of auditors worldwide using purpose-built technology favor ACL as the preferred software for fraud detection and prevention, according to the most recent Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA) software survey.

Find out how an internationally respected accounting firm used ACL software to uncover over $70 million in fraud and error. Download the Summerford Accountancy success story to learn more!