INVESTIGATIVE SERVICES

Fraud often remains undetected in corporate financial statements. Our Certified Fraud Examiners and Certified Public Accountants with prior law enforcement backgrounds examine financial information from a different perspective than traditional corporate auditors or outside accountants.

Our forensic investigations can ferret out accounting and or procurement fraud such as embezzlements, bid rigging, kickbacks, conflicts of interest, fiduciary violations, and other collusive improprieties. We will identify improper relationships, activities, and methodologies of the fraudsters, trace their movements, determine the magnitude of the damage, and then search for misappropriated money and assets. Our findings will assist you in making informed decisions as to whether to terminate employment agreements, litigate, or refer matters to law enforcement authorities.

During a litigation or arbitration, we can assist your counsel by uncovering admissible and credible information not readily available to attorneys, identifying and locating prospective deponents, vetting experts, conducting damage valuations, and refuting adversarial allegations.

Intellectual property is one of your company’s most valued assets. Unfortunately transgressors exploiting weak intellectual property enforcement and utilizing technological advances conduct intellectual property piracy and therein damage your corporate sales and reputation.

Corporations invest significant assets in product research and development. Unfortunately, competitors often seek to avoid research and development costs by compromising competitor employees with improper gratuities or lucrative employment offers for access to trade secrets and other proprietary information. If any of your employees conveyed, reported, copied or e-mailed your manufacturing and business practices, formulas, or other technological secrets to a competitor, we will investigate quickly, discretely, and decisively to identify offending parties and terms of remuneration or compromise through extortion.

Copyright law protects authorship. When you experience copyright piracy, whether it be piracy of literary, music, film or graphic works, we will help you and your counsel in uncovering the facts concerning these violations.

Diversion brokers create alternate distribution channels for unauthorized merchants to offer your product at 25-40% off retail sale prices. This practice jeopardizes your product reputation, exclusivity, and relationships with authorized retailers harmed by the off-price sales.

We will trace the movement of diverted gray market products by reviewing your manufacturing and distribution operations as well as warranty service claims received for identified gray market product. We will also search for your product in the marketplace and on the Internet and arrange for vendor account audits to identify questionable activities and suspicious buying patterns. We will help you monitor compliance by your employees, manufacturers, and distributors. Opportunities for diversion will be reduced, resulting in enhanced profits for your corporation and for authorized retail holders of your exclusive territorial sales rights.

Trademark counterfeiting is a global problem that affects the marketing and advertising rights of products and services. It proliferates because profits are high, civil penalties negligible, and the chances of apprehension minimal. We will investigate counterfeiting of your logos and designs by locating counterfeit product, effecting “street buys”, and discovering the source of the counterfeited product for presentation as evidence in civil proceedings and or to local, state or federal authorities to facilitate search warrants and seizures.

Lawyers, bankruptcy trustees, corporations, and others frequently retain us to recover assets before they become unrecoverable. We will trace fraudulent transfers of assets to U.S. financial institutions or offshore statute protected venues where money is concealed in secret nominee corporate accounts, in exempt bank accounts, and or in asset protection trusts. Our associates are knowledgeable of local laws and suspect financial institutions. Let us support your counsel by identifying information helpful in obtaining freezing and gag orders at suspect financial institutions of your misappropriated money, followed by discovery actions, injunctions and recovery orders.

Acts of slander and libel damage your reputation and may result in financial loss. We will aid you in defending against rumors and limiting financial loss by establishing the facts, identifying the responsible party, and when possible establishing motive. With this information in hand, you have the option of suing or otherwise confronting the offending party.

Corporations that self-insure and insurance carriers face increased risk liability from the growing numbers of fraudulent claims. Your company or third party administrator will be best equipped to evaluate these claims when assisted by claimant historical and current activity reports. We understand the issues related to health and death investigations, and claims for disability, liability, workers’ compensation, and indemnity. We also investigate the questioned activities of healthcare providers. Our work product allows clients to assess claims more confidently and prevent fraud.

Our investigators combine their investigative and technical skills to help you address specific environmental issues concerning RCRA (The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976) or CERCLA (The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 commonly known as “Superfund”) illegal dumping matters. We can assist you with these environmental insurance coverage disputes by researching government regulatory agencies and historical societies and libraries for historical documents, reconstructing a site’s waste management practices, identifying Potentially Responsible Parties at Superfund sites, and uncovering witnesses and or historical insurance coverage policies.

Verbal exchanges and telephone conversations can be intercepted or monitored by unscrupulous eavesdroppers. Using state of the art equipment, our associates will provide Technical Surveillance Countermeasure Inspections commonly known as Security Sweeps to identify the presence of clandestine electronic listening devices.

The potential for compromise mandates the scrutiny of corporate information technology systems. Our associates can develop digital security procedures and policies for your company, test systems, and provide ongoing network and system checks.

Today, most business communication is by electronic means, and this digital information has become an important source for evidence during investigations. We sift through electronic data trails to determine relationships between individuals and business entities. Failure to properly examine, collect, document, and preserve digital evidence will make electronic data unusable in court. We employ state-of-the-art digital forensic tools to efficiently search, sort, recover, and analyze electronic data that complies with e-discovery obligations acceptable in a court of law. Let our associates help you in complex e-discovery.

Our associates conduct forensic examinations of documents, handwriting samples, and latent fingerprints to verify authenticity and time of production. We also conduct forensic audio and videotape authentications and enhancements.

Documentary videotapes can display the physical activities and capacities, and sometimes the mental or psychological capacities, of a subject. We utilize the most current video and still photography technology providing both short and long-range capabilities to implement undetected surveillance.