When you share a bed with someone, you become considerate. I try to move slowly out of bed so that miss Accountability is not affected. Not easy.
“The case has already gone to your brains. You need to take it slow”, she says. Good morning Amooti.
Continued from Part 1.
I say as I proceed to my seven minutes daily routine. At first, I used the first hour of waking up on reading. Now, I dedicate it to indoor cardio. I find the 7minutes exercises, by Perigee handy. Just two ‘circuits’ of any exercise in the morning are fantastic. It is hard not to sweat.
I complete the routine and off to work I go, as Accountability drops the kids. At the office, I find an email from James (the group CEO) providing more information. Following our meeting, find more information about the case.
One Sunday evening, on 19th July fraudsters, stole an estimated Kes. 3,300,000 from several bank accounts. They had created multiple accounts with fictitious identities where money was sent. Fraudsters withdrew money from different bank branches. The Uganda shillings are equivalent to Kes. 1,800,000 was wired to the Ugandan subsidiary, the big part of which was then sent to South Africa and withdrawn from there. It happened so that that only Kes. 250,000 was blocked! A lot of time was wasted by trying to wait for the fraudsters. They smelt the rat and ignored the balance on the account. On checking the know your customer details on the accounts where the money had been withdrawn, no records were found. It was surprising that there were no KYC records in Kampala either!
This made the executive and the board suspect the fraud as an insider job, involving high-level connections both internally and externally.
I was given the list of all staff in IT, treasury operations and branch operations. It is tough to investigate cases with several suspects.
You don’t know who to trust so that they help in the coordination of the assignment.
The stated objectives of the investigations were simple: determine who did what, where, and how. Before undertaking any investigation, it is critical to specify the owner of the investigations report and the contact person to facilitate the investigations.
The investigations owner is the person with the final say on the case. Such a person could lose interest in the case anytime in which case investigations could be frustrated since resources would no longer be available to facilitate completion.
The investigations contact person is usually the integrity manager, internal auditor, risk manager, head legal or anyone in the organization that is independent of the processes in which the fraud took place.
Copyright Mustapha B Mugisa, 2020. All rights reserved.
