Advanced Interview Techniques
for Investigating Internal Fraud and Abuse

(2 days; 16 CPE Hours)

Learn critical interviewing concepts and skills.

Even good employees sometimes do bad things. If your organization encounters an instance of employee abuse or fraud such as misuse of company resources, theft of assets, fraudulent disbursement, or other issues, investigation of the incident will require interviewing and interrogating employees. Such interviews require special preparation, documentation, and interviewing skills in order to resolve cases of internal fraud or abuse.

What you will learn in this two-day hands-on workshop.

What are people hiding from you? Criminals, clients, customers and even colleagues may each be hiding something from you. Learn how to be more effective in asking questions and evaluating responses so you can better detect lies and uncover the truth. By enhancing your interview techniques, you will get more information, more insight and less deception from everyone you interview. Even experienced professionals will improve their interviewing skills with this renowned course.This two-day workshop will give you the knowledge and skills you need to effectively interview and interrogate witnesses, conspirators, and perpetrators potentially involved with incidents of fraud or abuse. Set into a practical workshop format, important concepts are reinforced through your in-class analysis of real videotaped interviews from actual investigations of two cases of internal employee fraud. Concepts are further reinforced through 14 workshop case studies you will help solve in class along with other attendees.

While course highlights are described below, the class is exhaustively described in CIS’ separate detailed course outline.  Course modules include:

• Know your boundaries: Legal considerations for investigating and interviewing employees

  • Do you know your legal authority for conducting interviews?

  • Can you use deception in interviews?

  • How do you avoid breaching the employees’ rights under law?

  • How do you avoid employee claims of breach of privacy, emotional distress, defamation, false imprisonment, or assault and battery?

  • What about trade union protection?

• Understand the science of communication

  • What are communication facilitators and inhibitors?

  • What is the employee really saying with word choice, tone, and syntax?

  • What is the employee really saying with body language from the head, face, nose, mouth, eyes, arms, shoulders, elbows, hands, legs, feet, and posture?

  • What is the employee really saying with anger, boredom, frustration, and body movements?

• Learn how to prepare for the interview

  • How do you properly establish the foundation for your investigation?

  • What is the best venue and physical environment for interviewing?

  • How should you plan the interview for witnesses, conspirators, and perpetrators?

• Learn how to conduct the interview

  • What are 13 verbal clues of deception you need to recognize?

  • What are 10 non-verbal clues of deception you need to recognize?

  • What is the proper interviewing sequence and use of questioning? How do you open the interview, get good information, resolve contradictions or deceit, and close the interview?

  • What is the best approach to obtaining an admission of guilt? How do you help the employee rationalize what he or she did and tell you what truly happened?

• Know how to reporting your findings

  • How should your findings be presented to company insiders, attorneys, defendants and witnesses, the press, or juries?

  • What is a good report structure for presenting your findings?

Who should attend this course?

• Internal fraud investigators/examiners
• Financial auditors
• Systems auditors
• Human resource management
• Accountants
  • Payroll
  • Accounts Payable/Receivable
  • Financial Statement Preparation/Filing
• Finance department management
• Sales management

Workshop Pre-Requisite Requirement

This workshop is an advanced course especially designed to help attendees investigate incidents of internal fraud or abuse. Attendees should therefore have a thorough  foundation of understanding of the legal aspects of fraud, as well as common fraud schemes prior to attending this advanced interview techniques workshop. We strongly recommend attending Certified Information Security’s two-day “Corporate Fraud Prevention and Detection” seminar prior to attending this follow-on course.

Your Instructor

Allen also occasionally authors articles for well-respected on-line journals such as Tech Republic.  He holds a Bachelor of Business Administration degree in risk management from the University of Georgia, has attended Universität Mannheim, and is conversationally fluent in German.

Course Pricing, Scheduling, and Registration

Our courses are offered at various locations across the United States and around the world.  Please visit our online event schedule for a current listing of course times and locations, or to request course pricing or other information.