#fraud-detection
Fraud Detection
Identify and prevent financial fraud with monitoring and controls
AI-Generated Receipts Are Now Most of Expense Fraud: How to Protect Your Small Business
AI-generated fake receipts rose from 0% to 70.8% of detected expense fraud in fourteen months, averaging $101 per claim, and small businesses can counter it by matching receipts to actual transaction records instead of judging document appearance.
Employee Dishonesty Insurance and Fidelity Bonds: What They Cover and What They Don't
A fidelity bond (employee dishonesty insurance) covers employee theft, forged checks, and payroll fraud that general liability and property policies exclude, and it's legally required for anyone handling a 401(k) plan's assets under ERISA.
Nacha's 2026 ACH Fraud Monitoring Rule: What Every Business Must Do
Nacha's Phase 2 ACH fraud monitoring rule took effect June 19, 2026, requiring nearly every business that originates ACH payments to run a documented, risk-based fraud monitoring process covering account ownership verification, change monitoring, anomaly detection, and audit trails.
The $9.8 Million Bookkeeper: What a Six-Year Embezzlement Case Teaches Small Businesses About Internal Controls
A Florida bookkeeper with signature authority stole $9.8 million over six years using fake vendor names — until an owner read the raw bank statement. How the fraud triangle, segregation of duties, and monthly independent reconciliation would have stopped it, plus ACFE data showing why $100K-scale losses at small companies are routine.
AI-Powered Fraud Detection for Small Businesses: Real-Time Auditing Without a Big-Four Budget
Business email compromise cost U.S. companies over $3 billion in 2025, averaging $137,000 per incident — and 45% of small businesses hit by BEC close within six months. AI-driven continuous auditing now starts around $20–$70/month; here's how anomaly detection, vendor account validation, and free controls like payment-change callbacks cut the risk without an enterprise fraud stack.
Check Fraud Is Still the #1 Payment Threat in 2026 — Here's What to Do About It
The 2026 AFP Payments Fraud Survey found 76% of U.S. organizations faced payment fraud in 2025, with paper checks the top target at 58% — ahead of ACH debits (30%) and wires (25%). Here's a practical small-business defense checklist, from Positive Pay and ACH filters to callback verification and weekly reconciliation.
AI-Generated Fake Invoices Are Fooling Accounts Payable Teams — Here's How to Stop Them
Generative AI made vendor impersonation cheap: 76% of organizations faced payments fraud in 2025, and AI-generated fakes now drive 70.8% of expense-report fraud. Here are the controls that still work — out-of-band verification, dual authorization, vendor-file hygiene, and auditable books.
How a Trailer Manufacturer's Bankruptcy Shows What Happens When Nobody Is Watching the Books
A Georgia trailer manufacturer's 2026 Chapter 11 filing traces partly to alleged employee theft discovered in 2024. Businesses under 100 employees suffer a median fraud loss of $141,000 per ACFE data — here are the segregation-of-duties controls that catch theft early, and why an auditable ledger matters.
Ghost Employee Fraud: How Fake Payroll Records Drain Small Businesses and the Controls That Catch Them
Ghost employee schemes cost U.S. businesses an estimated $400 billion a year and run a median of 18–30 months before detection. Learn the three common scheme patterns, the red flags already in your payroll data — duplicate bank accounts, unchanged withholding, missing I-9s — and the segregation-of-duties controls that stop them.
IRS Dirty Dozen 2026: How Payroll Phishing and Direct-Deposit Scams Target Small Businesses
The IRS's 2026 Dirty Dozen list flags a payroll-specific phishing wave: fake HR portal emails and direct-deposit change requests that reroute paychecks to scammers. The FBI's IC3 logged 24,768 business email compromise complaints totaling roughly $3.05 billion in 2025, with 86% of losses moving by wire or ACH — the same rails payroll runs on. Here are the three warning signs (urgency, unusual requests, process changes), five process controls that close the email-only loophole, and the first-72-hours response if a paycheck has already been diverted.
AI-Generated Fake Receipts Now Drive Most Expense Fraud: A Small Business Guide
AI-generated receipts jumped from 0% to 70.8% of fraud flags between March 2025 and May 2026, per AppZen data covering 1,471 fake receipts across 174 companies — and the average claim dropped to $101 as fraudsters shifted from a few large fakes to many small ones under auto-approval thresholds.
Dee v. Commissioner: When Is an IRS Audit Still 'Open' for a Whistleblower Award?
In Dee v. Commissioner (167 T.C. No. 1, July 2026) the Tax Court ruled an IRS examination stays legally "open" for whistleblower jurisdiction until formally closed under Rev. Proc. 2005-32 — yet denied Dee an award because auditors had independently found the same $2 million deficiency a month before his tip, which was built entirely from public SEC filings.