Friday, 3rd March 2023
I was recently invited to join the Registry Trust team at GovNet’s 2023 Counterfraud Conference to outline my experience using TrustOnline as a valuable layer of assurance for the fraud risk frameworks of the unitary council where I formerly served as the Audit and Anti-Fraud Manager.
My introduction to TrustOnline came when, short of resources and budget, I was looking for an effective and efficient tool to add a vital added layer to our assurance and proactive fraud frameworks to prevent the significant COVID-19 grant losses we had previously experienced. Registry Trust offered a limited time offer to access TrustOnline during our due diligence processes for the next round of COVID-19 grant applications. And the results were phenomenal. Adding this quick, simple, accessible tool to our framework saved our council over £300,000 in 90 days. Hundreds of thousands of pounds of funds that would have been granted to fraudsters was kept safely in the public purse.
It didn’t take long for us to discover multitudes of other useful purposes for our new TrustOnline tool: procurement processes, due diligence, verification, politically exposed persons, at-risk business rate identification, insurance fraud, and case building for a historically problematic contractor. When used as an indicator, TrustOnline can not only prevent poor financial decisions, it can signal where resources should be focused. Over the course of my years working in fraud and risk management I have learned that prevention is a far more cost-effective approach than investigation and prosecution. TrustOnline is a valuable resource in the prevention of financial risk and fraud.
Article Credit: Mike Frost BAE