Case Study Two

We were tasked with assisting one of our clients with their ‘Fraud, Risk and Ethics’ campaign during 2017-2018.

1. Staff committed fraudulent acts on a regular basis because it was viewed as ‘small fraud’.
2. Alarming number of tender fraud related incidents which led to loss of revenue and affected the company audit
3. Staff had a careless attitude towards confidential information and incidents of digital theft were increasing
4. Big investment was made into providing the organisation with a fraud hotline which in three years were never used due to staff distrust in its anonymity
5. Employees felt a strong sense of victimisation when fraudulent acts or unethical behaviour was reported as their experience was that it became then more about who did the reporting as to investigating what was reported
6. Distrust in management as little or no action was taken against those who committed fraudulent acts and little or no feedback was provided

Our diagnostic highlighted the key pain points and from there we were able to set out our outcomes during our client alignment session.
The company had experienced an increase in Fraudulent acts and had a major incident which led them to contracting us to address the growing fraudulent culture.
Our programme was implemented over an 18-month period. The programme included a combination of the following
• Industrial Theatre (introduction to the characters & themes, understanding and unpacking the existing organisational culture within the Fraud, Risk and Ethics frameworks, what to expect on this journey and how the organisation plans to support the individual during this time)
• Focus Groups (unpacking the key themes and challenges on managerial and leadership level.) Creating task teams to camp fraudulent acts and instil a ‘self-policing’ environment
• Forum Theatre (depicting existing behaviours; inviting the participants to illustrate how said behaviours can be corrected and if it is a system/processes challenge how to support or how to escalate)
• Call for Fraud, Risk and Ethics tagline and ‘manifesto’. An in-house competition was launched, and employees entered their suggested taglines that would best describe the Fraud, Risk and Ethics campaign. The winning tagline was distributed on hand-outs throughout the organisation and this became synonymous with keeping each other accountable.
• Role-Plays were used throughout to enable staff to practically implement the way in which we need to go about being ethical always.
• We used a diverse group of actors, facilitators, change specialists for this project. It is important to note that although our team does consist of very well-known ‘celebrities’, their ‘fame’ does not have a cost impact on the programme. We work with industry professionals not because of their ‘fame’ but because of their work ethic and their ability to deliver unparalleled results.

Our solution provided our client with and led them to achieve the following over our 18-month programme;
1. Great decrease in smaller fraudulent acts such as; use of company phone for personal use, stealing refreshments from the coffee stations, taking other people’s lunch from the refrigerator, use of company entertainment budget for personal events
2. Interdepartmental ‘anti-fraud’ groups were initiated which focused on keeping one another accountable for keeping a clean fraud-free slate.
3. Overall 43% decrease in leakage of confidential information and digital theft through careless attitude
4. The very next day after one of our sessions with regards to the use of the ‘Fraud Hotline’, the hotline was used for the first time since inception and major fraud was uncovered which saved the organisation a possible loss of over 80 Million rand.
5. Employees were provided with the necessary tools on how to engage in those difficult situations where possible victimisation could occur. This led to empowered teams that kept each other accountable who lived the mantra of ‘fraud does not happen here’.
6. Our interactions with the leadership team led to the leadership ‘brown bag’ initiative where members of the leadership team committed to provide transparent and current feedback on all fraud, risk and ethics related incidents once a month.