White-collar crime

Last week, the people of Otago were served a timely reminder of white collar crime with the sentencing on additional charges of convicted fraud Michael Swann in the High Court at Dunedin.

It will be recalled that Swann was sentenced last year to a nine-and-a-half-year prison term for defrauding the Otago District Health Board of almost $17 million between 2000 and 2006.

On Friday, he was sentenced to 20 months' imprisonment - concurrent with his present term, meaning that he will in fact serve no extra time behind bars - for accepting $755,000 in bribes from long-time friend and business associate Robin Sew Hoy.

This was in exchange for channelling computer technology work to Sew Hoy's company during the same period as the other offences.

In this case, Swann pleaded guilty in November to a single charge under the Secret Commissions Act relating to 85 secret commissions payments.

"Secret Commissions" is an apt name for the Act in question because it goes to the heart of the world in which such crimes are committed and which makes them - unlike common burglary - difficult to detect.

They most frequently occur in areas of complex financial transactions, often with equally opaque but associated computer software processes - which require specialist expertise and which are often poorly understood by general management.

This week came the news that in fact fraud is much more prevalent in New Zealand than had been previously thought and that it was expected to increase markedly as the full effects of the financial downturn, and crime committed at its height, are uncovered.

The grim extent of such activity was revealed in a report by international auditing firm KPMG.

It shows there was a "massive" rise in the number of multimillion-dollar frauds exposed in New Zealand, with transgressions to the cost of $98 million caught out last year alone.

Fraud cases before the courts between July and December 2009 totalled $76.1 million while those between January and July amounted to $21.9 million.

KPMG's "Fraud Barometer" counts the costs of frauds that have been revealed and are before the courts and does not take into account crimes below $100,000.

According to the report, the most commonly encountered types of fraud include falsifying documents for bank loans and tax evasion.

The expectation is that these will only rise during the next year or two - with KPMG forensics partner Mark Leishman predicting that this year fraud figures could rise as high as $200 million.

Against this background, it is imperative that white-collar crimes - and they are genuinely white collar with the latest figures reinforcing that higher management with its superior access to information and authorisation codes steal far higher amounts than others - are rigorously tackled.

Not only are they a severe impost on the financial health of the companies or public organisations on which they are perpetrated, but they sap the confidence of shareholder and taxpayer alike.

Greater transparency of systems, more sophisticated oversight at sites of vulnerability, and more rigorous and frequent auditing is required and must be built in to the costs of business.

As the routine work of businesses and organisations increasingly migrates online and e-commerce assumes an ever greater proportion of an entity's transactions, the need for requisite security systems is amplified.

In the annals of recent New Zealand fraud cases, Michael Swann's represents an appropriate "how not to" approach: there were questions about his character and professional history that were not sufficiently followed up prior to his appointment; he was operating in an area - information technology - with inadequate oversight; and auditing processes simply were not sufficiently forensic to uncover his fraudulent actions earlier than they eventually did.

And further, he was perhaps the beneficiary of a more generalised complacency which finds it either convenient or, for whatever reason, more comfortable to imagine that crime is not carried out by "respectable" people in business suits.

If nothing else, this week's KPMG report has fired a loud warning volley across the bows of that particular myth.