As a professional  who deals with fraud, I find that dealing with fraud victims can be very challenging.

From an emotional standpoint, the victim is usually shocked and devastated that someone could do this to them and their company.  This is especially true if it is a small business, because many small company owners consider their employees to be like family. Thus it requires great emotional sensitivity on the part of the fraud professional to deal with this situation.  However, as fraud professionals, we know that there are a couple of very practical concerns that must be faced if we decide to take on an engagement.

The first is that the client has just lost a substantial amount of money and thus may not have much money to pay us.

The second is that fraud investigations can be very time intensive and it would be easy to accumulate many hours on the engagement just trying to figure out what happened.  Thus it is critical for the fraud professional to be able to quickly identify the scope of the problem in order to work efficiently and thus minimize client pushback on the number of billable hours.

I have discovered a software product called AuditMyBooks, that I am currently using that I believe addresses both of those concerns.  This product scans and analyzes QuickBooks files that you upload to the Intuit App Center. One thing to keep in mind is that none of this takes place on the desktop, rather this is done up in the cloud in Intuit’s secure datacenter.

So, as a fraud professional, what are the benefits to me in using this product, AuditMyBooks?

I have already discussed how it can help you isolate the problems more efficiently and thus reduce client pushback on billable hours.  However, it also allows you to promote an AuditMyBooks engagement as a consulting service.  I see fraud professionals as being uniquely positioned to market this service. After all, for obvious reasons, you would not want the company bookkeeper to be running the tests. Also, many small business owners are not qualified to interpret the results or have any idea of the next action step, if any problems are uncovered.

I have a two prong marketing approach. For businesses that I do not know if there are any fraud issues, I will emphasize error detection, since fraud is such an emotional word.  For clients that come to me with concerns about fraud, I will emphasize the efficiency of identifying problems.  In any event, I believe that you could sell this as a quarterly service.  Other ideas that come to mind, would be to bundle it with a summary report or maybe doing a Benford’s Law analysis at the same time.

Written by Dennis Thompson – CPA, CFE

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