industry focus
Global Economic Retail Crime getting worse
Global economic crime impacting the retail and consumer markets is on the rise with almost half of respondents to a global survey being impacted.
But businesses are now taking tougher measures of prevention and informing law enforcement, according to the 2014 PricewaterhouseCoopers Global Economic Crime Survey, which is conducted by the international accountancy firm every two years.
Overall, economic crime has increased from 37% in 2009 when the survey was first conducted, to 49% this year, the firm found from its survey of 6000 respondents in almost 200 companies.
One of the key fraud trends was in the supply chain, with 34% of companies experiencing problems before items arrived in store
The biggest threat to businesses has been asset misappropriation – goods and merchandise – with 76% of respondents reporting an increase, but other crimes include procurement fraud (30%), increases in bribery and corruption (25%), accountancy fraud (23%), a rise in cyber-crime (23%), IP infringement (13%) and more HR fraud (9%) since the last survey in 2012.
Although the survey found that two out of five companies had not conducted fraud assessments in the last two years, it found that more companies were becoming more proactively engaged in tackling the problem.
A total of 72% were planning to carry out greater due diligence on staff and suppliers, compared to 65% in 2012 and there is evidence that the penalties are getting tougher.
Almost 90% of companies now have an active dismissal policy for dishonest staff, compared to 79% in 2012 and almost 50% plan to take civil action to recover goods through processes including civil recovery.
This was reflected in the other findings which revealed that almost 70% of crime was perpetrated by insiders.
