Cost of Fraud —A Major Concern
The precise cost of fraud throughout the United States is impossible to measure. However, many experts believe the cost of fraud has climbed will into the high multibillion-dollar range. Below are a few creditable costs of fraud estimates:
- Mortgage Industry: Cost of fraud is estimated by the FBI at more than $1 billion nationwide.
- Health-Care: The National Health Care Anti-Fraud Association estimates the health-care industry’s cost of fraud at more than $60 billion.
- Corporate Sector: The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners estimates the cost of fraud in U.S. organizations at 7 percent of annual revenues, or $994 billion.
- Insurance Industry: The National Insurance Crime Bureau estimates the cost of fraud at a total of $20 billion a year.
Again, the precise cost of fraud throughout the United States is impossible to measure. Whether the actual cost of fraud within the business sector is in the low or high billions, it is inexcusable to find, in case study after case study, that virtually all of the internal-fraud schemes exposed in a wide-range of businesses were preventable.
It is equally troublesome to discover that just a few financial-control breakdowns and management failures allowed the majority of those criminal exploits to continue for several years beyond the fraudster’s initial unlawful act. No wonder the cost of fraud is so high—and rising!
As result of the tough economic times in which we live, increases in employees’ situational pressures and employers’ cutbacks in personnel combined with the consolidations of critical job functions—opening the door to the potential fraudster— employers should expect internal fraud to increase and further elevate the cost of fraud.
The good news in that you can learn ways to keep the cost of fraud down by ordering a copy of Business Fraud: From Trust to Betrayal today!