Data Analysis

Using data to make informed decisions and detect fraud hiding in your systems

Organizations hold vast amounts of data spread across financial systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, procurement systems and other areas. The potential for problems is always present. Inadequate controls and system deficiencies often lead to inefficient transactions, which can ultimately result in increased costs and lost opportunities.

As well, complex systems provide endless hiding places for suspicious transactions. Fraudsters are creative: the human mind is inventive, devious and adaptable, particularly when there’s money involved. Detection is a challenge: Even if you have good reason to suspect something, finding evidence requires intelligent methods of detection. The target is always moving: With corporate restructuring, mergers and acquisitions, and systems changes, gaps can appear virtually overnight. Compliance is getting harder to achieve and manage. Regulations are more stringent than ever.

How PwC can help

With our experience of conducting hundreds of system reviews, we realize that they can be complex and high pressured. We know that off-the-shelf technology is not always capable of taking into account industry factors critical to reduce inefficiencies, errors and false positives. Even companies that have the technology and expertise often don’t want to run these complex analyses on live systems as they can pose potential risks if performed by inexperienced staff.

This is why engaging PwC is the right choice. We have developed sophisticated routines to unlock the information held within, and help clients to:

• Utilize data to improve/support business decisions
  • Identify transactional inefficiencies
  • Identify areas for performance improvement
  • Identify control weaknesses
  • Create an integrated reporting view for management utilizing data from many various systems
  • Perform root-cause analysis
• Identify/investigate suspected fraud
  • Look for patterns, trends and anomalous transactions
  • Look for evidence of corruption or collusion
  • Address whistle-blower allegations
  • Extract financial and structured enterprise data to comply with litigation or regulatory disclosure
  • Verify or dispute creditor claims (or perform other claims management)
  • Investigate compliance with competition, anti-corruption and other applicable regulations

We can help you determine which data to extract, then:

• Transfer the data
• Validate the data, easily detecting duplicates and exceptions
• Analyze the entire data set, not just a sample of it
• Create extremely complex tests, as required to support analysis (including compound analyses)
• Run red-flag reports and reports customized to the business issue at hand

Contact Peter Vakof for more information or read our full brochure below.

Data Analysis (134 KB) Download the full PDF brochure.