In a world of ever present noise, digital or otherwise, it can be difficult for business owners to consider adding yet another thing to their plate. Consideration of fraud risk is often one of these items that is pushed to the back of the plate, because everything is going fine. Until it isn’t.

Fraud risk is something that is often not considered until after it happens to a business for the first time. It could be something as simple as an employee’s theft of time, or it could be a complex vendor fraud scheme. Whether or not the fraud is substantial enough to cause financial damage to the business, the emotional damage it causes is always significant. Human nature is to trust those around us. When fraud occurs it often is an emotional event because it feels like a betrayal, but also is frustrating because very often it is preventable.

Assessing fraud risk does not have to be an unapproachable exercise. It can be as simple as looking at one section of the business at a time and asking “How could something go wrong here?”. For example, evaluating the payroll process – does the same employee have the ability to both cut and sign payroll checks, as well as add new employees to the payroll system? In this instance, a control could easily be put in place that once a month a manager independent of this process reviews the payroll check register for unfamiliar names or what appear to be duplicate checks.

The adage “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” is especially relevant in the case of fraud. The return on investment of resources expended in the prevention of fraud isn’t explicitly quantifiable, however the emotional return on the investment gives peace of mind that the business is as prepared as possible should this situation ever occur.