The Expert Podcast

This is David Active Intel Investigation. Today we're going to talk about the top five types of corporate investigations that we perform upon request.

The first is internal embezzlement. That's when an internal employee or manager embezzles from your company. This creates huge losses for corporation and those losses are four times higher when they're discovered after it pops up through your accounting department. They're much lower when they're revealed through an investigation and we're going to look for that fraud triangle right, the ability and need and justification of that employee, why they're stealing and how they're stealing.

Number two is corporate due diligence. This is when you're doing a buy-sell with another company. You want to do due diligence on maybe the company you're buying to make sure that represents are correct, or if you're selling due diligence on your purchaser to make sure that it's the right fit, maybe their finances are in order. You're also going to look at due diligence on a potential vendor if you're looking to buy something and you are going to have a vendor give you a product. You want to make sure that that vendor is capable providing that product. In the same time if you're buying something or somebody's buying from you and you want to take cash from them at a later date, you're going to want to make sure that their credit representations are correct.

Number three is competitor intel. If you have a competitor in your marketplace that's maybe growing, maybe it's a new competitor, maybe it's somebody you're going to provide a service or product in to their marketplace, you want to see if your new campaign can be structured to match up with that competitor. You also want to see how your salespeople are presenting your product to a new client, how it matches up with how your competitors are speaking to that client, maybe even how they're speaking about you.
Number four is fraud against the company. If there's a Ponzi scheme, maybe a check hiding scheme, maybe even a hacking scheme against your company, that's another type of investigation that's very common as a corporate investigation type.

And the last one, number five is litigation tactical preparation. If you have a lawsuit or legal activity against a company or against another party, or maybe they're taking action against you, doing tactical investigation for that action, maybe checking out the attorneys of the other side, what is their style of litigating, what types of expert witnesses will they put forward, what's the counter party like, do they have assets to fund this case either as a litigation plaintiff or defendant. Those are the kind of things that litigation tactical prep will help you and your law firm successfully execute that case.

So those are the top five methods of corporate investigations that might help you as a company.