With the world experiencing a spike in fraudulent activities since the COVID-19 pandemic, commissioner of revenue protection in the Ministry of Finance Cranston Morgan has implored financial institutions to ensure they properly vet new staff and periodically do the same with workers who are being moved to departments that deal with sensitive information.

Morgan was the keynote speaker at an anti-fraud conference staged by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners at Jamaica Pegasus hotel in St Andrew on Thursday, November 16.

“All institutions need to know who they are dealing with, such as the contractors, suppliers, customers, and employees,” Morgan told the conference, held under the theme ‘Action Required: Combating Fraud and Corruption Through Increased Vigilance and Innovation’.

“There is an organisation I know that employed a young man. This young man one day asked for time off from work to run some errands, but he did not return to work for several days. All efforts to contact him were futile. A supervisor went to make a report at a nearby police station and on hearing the name, the police explained that the young man was not missing. He was in a holding cell, waiting to be processed,” Morgan shared.

“The time he requested was to attend court as a suspect in a lottery scam case, but he wasn’t found guilty,” Morgan related.

“Fraud and corruption eat away from the inside. If you don’t have a proper vetting process to provide that gatekeeping, you are setting up yourselves,” he said.

He warned Jamaicans that if they continue to adhere to the ‘informer fi dead culture’, the economy will eventually be killed by fraud and corruption.

Morgan said that while asset misappropriation may have fallen during the height of the pandemic when more people were working remotely and had less contact with physical assets, PricewaterhouseCoopers’ global economic crime and fraud survey showed that 70 per cent of businesses that encountered fraud experienced new instances of it as a result of the disruption caused by COVID-19.

“Another development that fraudsters are benefiting from is the rapid development of the digital payments industry. The rapid growth of the many interconnected online transactions creates a larger playground for these criminals. Data from LexisNexis Digital Identity Network reveal a rise in global digital transaction volumes from January to June 2022. LexisNexis also asserts that growth in fraud affects growth of transactions. The fraudsters have been busy, so we need to get it right,” Morgan told the conference.

Other presenters were Everton Ferguson, executive director of EY Caribbean; Adrian Brown, group security supervisor at Sagicor Group; and Derjean Grant of Symptai Consulting Limited.

Conference panellists were Keisha Prince-Kameka from the Integrity Commission; Danielle Archer, principal director of National Integrity Action; Sandra McLeish, director of Jamaica Manufacturers and Exporters Association; and Jervis Moore, director of investigations at the Major Organised Crime and Anti-Corruption Agency.