The Challenge 

Disputes and compliance law firm Tenet Law specialises in fraud and financial crime. 

As founder and experienced investigator Arun Chauhan explains, the firm was instructed by a client accused of defrauding a business account to make personal purchases and cash withdrawals. 

Arun and his investigatory team of legal and accountancy professionals needed to quickly build an evidence based, legally robust case to disprove the claim. This involved analysing a substantial volume of financial data sourced from 90 bank statements across 5 different bank accounts, and resulting in almost 8,000 separate line transactions. 

The Tenet Law team knew from experience how onerous it would be to search and analyse this volume of data using a traditional spreadsheet based approach. With the inherent risk of human error associated with a manual review with repetitive tasks, and knowing that an expert level of knowledge of MS Excel would be required to analyse the resulting data, Tenet were conscious of how opponents could challenge such work product and analysis. 

It simply didn’t make commercial sense for Tenet’s client to pay the costs of analysis, whether that was carried out by Tenet or forensic accountants. Tenet and the client took the view that working manually in MS Excel would be slow, require a lot of resource, and be vulnerable to human error – all of which compromised their ability to identify and understand complex money flows in relation to the defendant and the suggested fraud. 

Solution 

Faced with these challenges, Arun wanted to explore whether fraud investigation software could provide a better solution, helping the team narrow down the volume of data and track lines of enquiry. He decided to use NEC Fraud Investigator to support the firm’s work on the case. 

NEC Fraud Investigator was used to ingest and normalise all 90 bank statements, freeing Arun’s team to search across the 5 different accounts both separately and together. The software includes a unique auto-tagging on ingest feature, which enabled the investigators to instantly highlight items such as weekend or round figure transactions for further scrutiny. 

Using the software provided Tenet Law’s investigators with a single view across all this data, giving them visibility of the key players and their financial trails. The focus in the case came down to spending at specific online shops and identifying cash withdrawals. Once these transactions and dates were isolated, Tenet could easily search and focus on payments to them, tagging the transactions to verify the total sums and how they were paid for. 

Ultimately, the functionality provided by NEC Fraud Investigator equipped Tenet Law to quickly capture robust evidence that proved that the value of the transactions and where monies had been paid were not as alleged.

Value 

The investigatory team were able to rapidly build a thorough, arguable case that significantly reduced the value of the claim. In reducing the value of the claim, it soon became clear that the only transactions / payments of concern to the Claimant were ones the Defendant client was able to show he had been authorised to have received. 

Using NEC Fraud Investigator added speed, analysis and reliability, all of which gave Tenet Law’s client confidence in the firm’s approach on the case. Secure in the knowledge that the firm’s client was fully satisfied with the result, using the software also helped minimise Tenet Law’s casework overheads, and freed-up team members for more strategic work. 

Arun’s team found that using NEC Fraud Investigator provided faster, richer insights to a complex financial data investigation than following more traditional, manually based techniques. 

Find out more

To learn more about NEC Fraud Investigator, visit https://www.necsws.com/nec-fraud-investigator or email hello@necsws.com.