Investigating a Potential Fraud Without Causing Large Morale Problems Inside of the Company…
Assume that you were the Internal Fraud Investigation Manager for Computer Apple Company. Your company has a Research and Development (R&D) Department that is housed in a separate building under extremely tight security, including fingerprint recognition technology and visual closed captioning TV cameras to maintain a permanent log of employees entering and exiting the building. Research and Development Department employees are required to leave the building for lunch as part of an employee ‘work and leisure balance’ program initiative launched by the company in recent years. No exceptions are allowed to this policy.
The company is the leader in the development of state-of-the-art chips which will be incorporated into the new mobile phones being developed by Apple and Samsung.
It is getting close to the time where the final development of these new state-of-the-art chips will be ready to release for production to both Apple and Samsung. Prototypes have been developed and tested both internally and with Apple and Samsung. Numerous prototypes of various sizes and shapes have been developed and tested by employees working in the R&D department.
In the last week, the R&D department manager notices that some of the prototypes are unaccounted for in the department. Due to the obvious sensitivity and importance of the disappearance of these prototypes, management with your approval decides to search every employee entering and leaving the R&D facility. These searches will include searching lunch bags and personal items of employees leaving for the required lunch break each day. The employees working for the R&D department became enraged, and several circulated a petition to start a union. Some employees declared they would consider leaving the company due to a perceived lack of trust and invasion of privacy caused by the search policy.
Please provide an initial response to each question below; then, read your classmates’ responses and respond substantively to at least two of your classmates’ initial responses to each question. To make sure you cover the Requirements of this Discussion, I suggest you copy and paste each question below into your initial response:
Were there other ways the company under your direction as the Internal Fraud Investigation Manager could have initiated an investigation of this potential theft or fraud without the morale issues that resulted from the way it was handled? Be specific.
Are there or were there any types of technology that you, as the Internal Fraud Investigation Manager, could have recommended within the R&D department to prevent this potential theft from happening in the first place? Be specific also about what implementing the technology might accomplish.
Can you think of a preventative and a detective control (one of each), other than what has been provided above, that could have been implemented in the R&D department to detect that the chips were missing earlier? Be specific.