Strategy & Leadership

Professional services

Africa

Africa

The professional services industry has a low exposure to fraud relative to other sectors.

  • The loss per firm for the past three years is $2.3m. This is equivalent to around one-third of the survey average and is one of the lower figures.
  • Respondents believe that the prevalence of fraud has stayed the same over that period.
  • Fewer professional services firms have experienced each category of corporate fraud than the average, except for information and IP theft. In particular, only 20% suffered from theft of physical assets. Although this arises partly from the sector being knowledge-intensive without a physical product, the figure is still the lowest for any industry.

This sector includes professions that actively combat fraud, or for which suspicion of fraud presents an increased danger because reputation is so important in maintaining clients. This has several effects on the nature of, and response to, corporate fraud.

  • These companies are more likely to deal with the issue directly and combat the problem themselves. Sixty-one percent say that they manage it in house compared with 45% of all companies.
  • Accordingly, professional services firms are half as likely to turn to the big four accountancy firms (16% compared with 33% for the average).
  • In the past three years, a slightly lower percentage of companies than average has suffered from bribery and corruption (15% compared with 19%), regulatory breaches (15% compared with 19%) and money laundering (2% compared with 5%)

The sector faces the usual problems of a knowledge industry, but may not be addressing them aggressively enough.

  • The most frequently reported types of fraud are information theft (29%) and IP theft (21%). These are also two of the three areas where the greatest number of respondents feels highly vulnerable (26% and 19% respectively).
  • Complex IT structures have increased exposure to fraud at one-third of companies.
  • However, the proportion of companies using IT security and countermeasures to combat fraud is only 69% and just 57% say that they intend to increase investment in that area. Both of these figures are slightly lower than the average. Meanwhile, only one-third of professional services firms say that they engage in IP monitoring – this is lower than the average – and just 37% are looking to invest in this area.

The professional services sector should pay particular attention to IT security and IP monitoring, especially as legal and accounting firms should already be strong in other aspects of fraud control.

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