I am sure all of us remember that we have undergone various types of training during our careers so far. Some of those training are naturally very memorable whereas others are not. The content of ones that were not memorable disappeared from our minds eventually as they could not stick in our minds positively.
The inference we can draw here is that the effectiveness of the training depends on the way it is conducted and the frequency of its repetition. For the content of a training to stay in the participant’s mind, it has to be memorable, and it has to be presented in a way that captures the participants’ attention. Further, it matters a lot when it comes to that person who is presenting that matter, depending on the topic more often. For example, when a topic on integrity is delivered, the participants will start paying attention to the presenter even more than the content because the presenter’s reputation is much more important than the content itself.
Everybody agrees with what was mentioned above and that is true for any kind of training; now let us put that into the context of training to manage the risk of fraud. Suppose you talk to a consultant or fraud expert. They will always say that the organizations should continue to educate people on fraud and fraud policies and the repercussions of perpetrating fraud in the light of organization and regulations and legal perspective in the environment in which the entity operates. Yet, vast majority of senior executives of corporates, have their doubts of that perception unfortunately.
Based on numerous experiences I have, I find it very strange that the vast majority of corporate executives in charge of corporate governance continue to believe that there is no effect or there is only a minor effect on fraud management from fraud education. They continue to believe that fraud management is not going to be possible through the conduct of training. Therefore, they do not tend to take fraud training seriously. I have seen this thinking and tendency repeatedly when we make attempts to convey the message that there is a significant positive effect on reducing fraud occurrence through the facilitation of proper practical fraud awareness training and other training such as code of conduct training.
I was curious to hear this repeatedly from many senior executives of different companies whenever I tried to pass the message that they should continue to focus on fraud awareness training to educate people. Unfortunately, I only had success on limited occasions. So, therefore, I thought of searching for the reason for such thinking and belief, and eventually, I was able to figure out the real reason beneath their conclusion. Further research into it indicated only they were to blame for such thinking because they had not done certain things alongside, which makes fraud education effective in their companies.
Some of the examples that I came to know were related to issues we never anticipated . For example, there was a company where they used to do annual fraud and code of conduct training. However, there have been more fraud happening in that company than their peers, which prompted the company’s senior executives to believe that such training had no effect. However, we found that the company’s training was not taken seriously by the employees just because of the trainer’s reputation, whose conduct and character had serious issues and was known to many of the company’s employees. In other words, the trainer had questionable ethical conduct and was rumored to have been involved in much unethical conduct—, which made the training a “joke” based on the comments of one employee I interviewed. Employees were of the view that the training was conducted for the sake of conducting without a seriousness.
The second reason was related to the way how the training is conducted. The trainer usually came with a set of training slides and then regurgitated the content from the moment it began to the moment it ended. Further, the material was completely copied from their regional training alongside with examples outside the market which perhaps they had been using universally without any customization to the local market, and the trainer did not have any first-hand experience on any of the cases that were discussed and nor experience in the fraud risk management and never gave the opportunity for the participant to ask questions.
The third reason was the entire training was one-sided, which means that the trainer conducted the training without any meaningful interaction with participants, which made the entire training a pretty boring exercise.
The fourth reason is that there was no way after the training that the management was able to ensure whether the participants understood the training. There was no assessment or something similar to ensure that the people have understood the concepts taught during the training session.
Based on the above information, I understood the management perception that the fraud education was ineffective in reducing the risk of fraud in the organizations.
Therefore, I wanted to provide some food for thought for senior executives of corporates when conducting their annual or bi-annual fraud awareness and code of conduct training to make them memorable, make them practical to make them effective and contribute to the reduction of the occurrence of fraud which, if not controlled early, end of becoming massive scandals. The best practice would be to run this training every six months by paying attention to the following point to meet the objectives that were mentioned above:
1)Use the trainers who are totally respected in the company regarding their level of integrity and loyalty to the company. In addition to these characteristics, I also suggest that these trainers should have more than an adequate level of knowledge in the area of risk management in general and in fraud risk Management in particular.
2) When preparing material for fraud awareness training, pay more attention to customizing it to the Vietnamese environment since the type of fraud is pretty different from country to country and region to region. In other words, management must make sure that this material is customized to the local environment so that the participant starts feeling that this material is relevant to their lives and their work experiences which they can relate to.
3) Make the training interactive enough so that the participants can feel free to share their experiences and feel proud about contributing, which makes this training more memorable for participants. Perhaps one more thing the management can consider doing is that making available small gifts, stationery under the theme of the training which the participants can take away.
4) After the training is completed, there should be a way of making sure that the knowledge is tested and recorded in the company’s human resource documentation.
Anyone would agree that these are small things and extremely easy to implement, but they’re going to be making the training effective, and then it helps employees and the participants, and the audience to be able to understand the company policies and eventually comply with them and develop loyalty to the company thereby reducing the propensity to reduce fraud. People obviously may have different level of agreements with my point of view depending on their exposure to anti-fraud world. It is also not uncommon to find corporate executives who internationally do not want to make the fraud awareness training effective and the reason underneath such a motive is not difficult to guess.
If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud
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