Forensic Services

We help to protect the value and reputation of your business by supporting you to manage the risks associated with fraud and misconduct, financial crime, regulatory interventions, and other unplanned events.

The success of any organisation depends to a great extent on its reputation. In the globalized world, business dangers can appear without warning, both from within and externally.

Are you sufficiently prepared for crises and unplanned events?
Do you know how to react correctly in case of bribery and corruption, fraud or other economic crimes?
Have you developed strategies to emerge stronger from such crises?

PwC’s Forensics experts can help you do so. As the global landscape grows more complex and connected, companies are at threat of a sudden shock. It could be a corruption scandal that spreads globally, a data breach that shakes customer confidence, a dispute with a business partner threatening to erode value, or widespread fraud. With shock also comes opportunity. An incident managed well allows an organisation to take on riskier opportunities with the knowledge that future threats will be spotted and addressed quickly.

Prepare

We help you take action to prevent economic and financial crimes, misconduct and disputes, navigating regulatory complexity to protect your business from financial and reputational damage.

Respond

A crisis, or other unanticipated event, can arise suddenly and unexpectedly in any organisation and cause enormous risk to your brand reputation, people and relationships. We respond quickly to mitigate risk during an incident and help prevent further damage, through investigation, advice and other interventions.

Recover

We will support you to recover from an incident or crisis to resume operations as quickly as possible, whilst improving your ability to learn from the event and enhance your preparation in future.

When faced with a crisis, a company must be confident that the support and solutions it receives are sufficient to counterbalance the threats it faces. Dealing with anomalies and managing fraud risks help secure a company's good reputation and tangible and intangible assets. Proactive risk management, clarification of detected discrepancies, investigation of fraud and corruption, resolution of disputes and issues related to supervisory authorities - these are all elements that together create a watertight system to counteract fraud and ensure the security of the enterprise.

Our services

Financial crime compliance
Commercial disputes, forensic accounting investigations and regulatory response
Investigating fraud, corruption and misconduct
Preventing fraud and corruption
Protected disclosures and whistleblower hotline
Big data analytics for e-Discovery

Financial crime compliance

PwC advisors can help you with

Understanding where the business is vulnerable to bribery and corruption risks.
Conducting an anti-money-laundering (AML) or sanctions audit.
Addressing AML or sanctions audit findings.

Commercial disputes, forensic accounting investigations and regulatory response

"Establish facts. Analyse the issues. Develop a dispute resolution approach."

It sounds simple, but it can be time-consuming and costly to tackle on your own. If you are experiencing the below scenarios, we can help.

Needing someone to investigate financial transactions/arrangements.
Needing accounting/valuation support for a commercial/contractual dispute, and to understand whether the other party followed the agreement.
Needing to know where the money/assets went, and help to quantify the value of loss suffered.

Investigating fraud, corruption and misconduct

Carefully and appropriately planned prevention of threats arising from fraud, corruption, employee and other serious misconduct and business disputes is far more cost-effective than remediation. Sadly, we know that it is not always possible. If you are experiencing the following scenarios, we can help.

Fraud, bribery or corruption has been identified in the organisation.
Someone has stolen money or other assets from the business or organisation.
I have witnessed misconduct, what should I do?

I need an impartial party to investigate a matter and identify the pertinent facts.
I need someone to quantify potential loss due to fraud.

Preventing fraud and corruption

In our experience, there are two critical activities that help organisations effectively manage their fraud and corruption prevention readiness and the ability to adequately manage incidents: first, understanding their risk landscape; and second, assessing the maturity of the frameworks that are in place to mitigate these risks. Other activities stem from these and are aimed at specific aspects of fraud and corruption prevention and enhancing risk response.

.We can help you with:

Fraud and corruption risk assessment.
Assessing the maturity of the fraud prevention framework.
Testing and validation of fraud and corruption control mechanisms.
Developing, improving and implementing policies and procedures.
Training and awareness raising - fraud, corruption, ethical behaviour.

Protected disclosures and whistleblower hotline

On September 1, 2024, the EU Whistleblower Protection Act came into force in Estonia, imposing new obligations and tasks on many organisations. We help organisations meet these requirements in the most efficient way and create valuable additional information channels to learn about potential fraud using our globally developed processes and tools.

We can help with the following:

Setting up a whistleblower/speak up hotline/service at the organisation.
Establishing or updating the whistleblowing and/or protected disclosures policies.
Training on Protected Disclosures.

Big data analytics for e-Discovery

Finding a needle in a haystack is difficult, but not impossible. In case of critical events or suspected fraud, we help clients find the necessary information from the large electronic databases in their possession. We can offer our automated solutions for operatively finding the necessary information among 100 000 e-mails and 1TB documents in the view of keywords, counterparties or specific time periods.