Business Fraud Risk Assessment Training Course

Course overview

Fraud risk assessment is the step most organizations skip. They buy monitoring tools, run awareness sessions and write a policy, without ever having established which fraud schemes are actually possible given how their processes work. The result is protection concentrated where the vendor's product happened to look, and exposure left where the segregation of duties quietly broke two reorganizations ago.

This course is about doing the assessment properly across five units: fraud risk in business, assessment methodology, detecting and analyzing schemes, controls and monitoring, and building an organization that is genuinely hard to defraud. It draws on the ACFE occupational fraud framework and COSO control principles, and is educational rather than legal advice.

Why the assessment has to start from the process

A fraud scheme is not an abstract risk. It is a specific sequence: this person, with this access, can create this record, approve it themselves, and cause money to move to an account they control. Written that way, the assessment becomes testable, the control gap becomes obvious, and the mitigation becomes concrete.

Written the other way, as "risk of payment fraud: medium", it produces nothing. The whole discipline of fraud risk assessment consists of refusing the abstraction and asking, for each process, exactly who could do exactly what.

Course objectives

By the end of the course, participants will be able to:

• Map fraud schemes to the actual steps of a process.
• Walk a process and name who could do what at each step.
• Score each identified scheme on likelihood and impact.
• Detect a scheme already running rather than merely possible.
• Compensate where one person holds every step of a payment.
• Prioritize control spending against the exposure it removes.
• Refresh the assessment when the business changes shape.
• Deter fraud that policies and training alone have not stopped.

Course outline

Unit 1: Introduction to fraud risk in business

• The fraud triangle, and what the model leaves out.
• Fraud categories from asset misappropriation to corruption.
• A vendor that cost more in legal fees than in invoices.
• Why opportunity outlives policies, training and audit.

Unit 2: Fraud risk assessment methodologies

• Process-based assessment of role, access and mechanism.
• Scheme libraries built from one company's own processes.
• Testing whether an existing control blocks the scheme.
• Documenting an assessment that is challenged, not shelved.

Unit 3: Detecting and analyzing fraud schemes

• Payables schemes from shell vendors to bank detail changes.
• Payroll schemes from ghost employees to inflated claims.
• Threshold analysis and the payment split to stay below it.
• Behavioral signals that are never a case on their own.

Unit 4: Controls, monitoring, and response

• Authorization limits and master data change control.
• Teams of four, and the compensating controls they need.
• Management override and the journal entry that reveals it.
• Exception reports and the named person who reads them.

Unit 5: Building a fraud-resistant organization

• Named ownership of fraud risk, and who tests it.
• Tips from the people standing at the next step.
• Bonus structures that put one person under real pressure.
• Reassessment after a new system, market or restructuring.

How the course is delivered

The course uses documented fraud cases, real process maps, control matrices and transaction data extracts. Participants walk processes, name the schemes, and argue about which controls actually stop them; worked examples take a payables dataset through the analytics that surface a shell vendor. The course is educational and does not certify participants, investigate any organization, or provide legal advice on a live case. Those who want the detection techniques in more depth should look at Fraud Detection and Prevention Strategies.

Who should attend

• Internal auditors and risk managers responsible for fraud risk.
• Finance, procurement, payables and payroll managers who own the processes fraud targets.
• Compliance officers and investigators.
• Business managers accountable for control environments.

About EuroQuest International Training

EuroQuest International Training was founded in 2015 by a team with more than 25 years of experience in professional development. We deliver over 1,000 courses and have trained more than 15,000 participants, from our head office in Bratislava, Slovakia, with hubs in Dubai, London, Barcelona, Istanbul, Vienna, Paris and Geneva. Courses are developed and reviewed by practitioners from the fields they teach.

Frequently asked questions

We are a small company with limited segregation of duties. Is this useful?

Yes, and the course spends time on it. Where separation is impossible, compensating controls such as review of bank detail changes, independent reconciliation and owner review of exception reports carry the weight, and they need to be designed deliberately.

Do I need analytics skills?

No. The detection tests are explained in business terms, clearly enough that you can specify them to an analyst or apply them in a spreadsheet.

Does the course include a live lab?

No. There is no software environment. Analytics are taught through documented data extracts and worked examples in discussion.

Related courses

• Fraud Detection and Prevention Techniques
• Corporate Compliance and Internal Audit Best Practices
• Financial Crime Prevention and Regulatory Compliance
• Creating a Culture of Compliance and Accountability

Register for this course

Select a city and date from the schedule above and register, or contact EuroQuest about in-house delivery for a finance, audit or compliance team.