Capability controls

Capability controls establish the organisational foundation for effective fraud prevention and management by setting the tone from the top. They focus on building and sustaining an ethical culture grounded in transparency, accountability and integrity, ensuring that expectations around conduct are clearly understood across the organisation.

These controls require leaders to consistently model expected behaviours and demonstrate a visible commitment to ethical decision making and zero tolerance for fraud. They also ensure that roles, responsibilities and accountabilities are clearly defined, enabling staff to understand their part in preventing, detecting and responding to fraud risks.

  • Clearly define decision-making powers to increase transparency and reduce the opportunity for fraud and corruption

    Defined decision-making powers

  • Create an ethical culture that encourages supportive behaviours, while discouraging potentially fraudulent or corrupt activities

    Ethical culture

  • Establish governance and oversight mechanisms to oversee critical decisions and risks

    Governance and oversight

  • Provide guidance and support to customers, employees and third parties to ensure they follow correct processes, comply with rules and meet expectations

    Help and support

  • Involve more senior or independent personnel in actions, approvals and decisions to increase transparency and reduce the opportunity for fraud

    Managerial or independent oversight

  • Promote sharing of information, capability and intelligence to prevent and disrupt fraud

    Strategic partnerships

  • Have sufficient staffing and technical resources to enable processes, checks and oversight to function adequately

    Sufficient resourcing

  • Provide employees with task-specific training to ensure that processes are followed and decisions are made correctly and consistently

    Trained and qualified employees

Know your options

Organisations can use the information for each control to:

  • identify and understand available fraud control options
  • see examples of the control in action
  • understand the risks of control gaps
  • assess whether existing controls are operating effectively
  • identify complementary controls to strengthen the control environment
  • identify controls relevant to specific fraudster personas.

Download the complete fraud control catalogue

Explore a range of controls that can be put in place to reduce the risk of fraud happening in your organisation.

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