Moving Forward after an Investigation

An extract from the 2021 edition of Americas Investigations Review. The whole publication is available at https://globalinvestigationsreview.com/edition/1001545/americas-investigations-review-2021

In “Moving Forward after an Investigation,” a chapter from GIR’s The Americas Investigations Review, Frances McLeod, Jenna Voss and Umair Nadeem, provide practical suggestions for ensuring a strong control environment post-investigation and suggest best practices that companies should consider to ensure they are well-positioned to detect and investigate future fraudulent or non-compliant behaviour. They also highlight how companies need to consider the unique challenges the covid-19 pandemic presents.

In their chapter, they’ll review:

• Covid-19 may have limited some companies’ opportunity to, or prioritisation of, conducting effective root cause analysis or risk assessments
• Economic downturns may increase an organisation’s exposure to fraud and misconduct, and short-term cost savings eventually create gaps within the overall compliance programme, which can result in investigations
• Companies should not take the approach that the current business environment is only ‘temporary’ and should ensure effective remediation of all identified vulnerabilities
• Recent international public scandals demonstrate the need for companies to continue to evaluate the effectiveness of their reporting and investigations channels, especially in the aftermath of an investigation
• Multinational organisations must be able to evaluate and understand how cultural drivers shape attitudes toward compliance across global locations

Read the whole publication here.

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