No employer wants to believe their employees are stealing from them, yet procurement fraud is one of the fastest growing and most widespread crimes globally. Procurement fraud—in its many forms, including fraudulent payment activity and malpractice in vendor onboarding—flies under the radar of many organizations.
The scale of procurement fraud is difficult to embrace because of the different shapes it takes and the complexity to investigate. There are at least six common types of procurement fraud: kickbacks and corrupt payments, corrupt influence, collusion and manipulation by bidders, billing fraud, conflicts of interest, and delivery fraud. Manual methods of detection alone are ineffective at solving the problem, often unveiling just a fraction of cases only when it’s too late. To stay ahead of a severe problem, employers need automated risk screening and ongoing monitoring whenever possible.
Ongoing monitoring involves automated scans of cleaned and enhanced data records from various sources including company registers, transparency indexes, and lists of politically exposed individuals. Based on the needs of each company and associated industry, configurations of the ongoing monitoring system can help risk managers and compliance officers identify evidence of bribery, money laundering, political exposure, negative media reports, and other risks.
To properly set up ongoing monitoring of third parties, each must be required to complete a detailed questionnaire. These questionnaires can be challenging to manage based on volume, complexity of the third party’s operations, and details of the relationship. Regardless of these challenges, companies must follow government guidelines and regulations when finding and monitoring third parties. This is why manual detection on its own must be made a thing of the past. Vcheck Global provides instant screening, ongoing monitoring, and configurable automated workflows for companies to onboard and manage their third-party portfolio with the third-party risk management platform Vcheck RED.
Compliance teams demand real-time information to prevent money from falling into the wrong hands, therefore a data-driven solution powered by automation and sourcing clean, reliable data sources is key to mitigate risk. With Vcheck RED, companies have access to a robust platform that helps them both preemptively detect signs of fraud, bribery, corruption, and other risks before engaging a third party and detect such evidence over the course of the relationship if and when it is recorded by data sources.
The value of Vcheck RED is in its capabilities to manage 100 percent of your third parties and corresponding documents, data, and audit history from a cloud-based platform enabled with one-touch reporting and communication tools. Vcheck Global configures the platform to meet the needs of each client’s risk policies, thresholds, tolerances, and workflows. An audit trail is provided for every compliance decision and action taken, and Vcheck Global’s regarded enhanced due diligence services are seamlessly integrated for quick ordering of reports.
To learn more about how our third-party risk management platform Vcheck RED and the associated enhanced due diligence services provided by Vcheck Global to help companies mitigate procurement fraud, visit https://vcheckglobal.com/third-party-risk-management.