Getting Serious About Fraud

I like to watch television. I know a lot of people may think that is not a good thing. In fact, many people may even think it lowbrow. However, I was born at a time (the 1950s) when we believed television and drugs would make the world a better place to live. And eventually they did.

Television programs about the police and crime have always been popular whether it is the old Dragnet series with Detective Joe Friday, or the new CSI shows. Crime dramas are fun and exciting to watch. In fact, I was so influenced by these programs I earned a college degree in Law Enforcement and got a job working for a Police Department. I know, scary thought–Rob with a gun and a nightstick.

For a lot of reasons, I stopped doing that job, but the urge to “solve a crime” and “catch a bad guy” still runs deep. Anyone involved with Revenue Assurance should be able to identify with this tendency. Revenue assurance people are basically detectives who solve crimes, identify offenders and make things right. In fact, it is almost impossible to deal with revenue assurance without running into issues of fraud, security and crime regularly.

For over the past two years, we at GRAPA have been working hard to research and determine exactly what people felt was their biggest need in terms of additional training and education. Of course, the core curriculum and certification are great (over 3,700 members, 700+ students and more than 150 people with GRAPA certification prove that). But, the one thing people keep clamoring for is more help with fraud.

I know there is a large overlap between revenue assurance and fraud domains and issues, but in the final analysis, there is still much to talk about, learn and do even when you focus solely on fraud. So, we set out to do something about that.

The first thing we did is find an expert to help us drive the process. Louis Kohr, our Director of the Fraud Programs brings years of experience in military training, telecom research and of course Fraud. He is a member of the ACFE (as an academic member) and has been working for over a year on the new Fraud program.

The second thing that we did is identify some of the best and brightest from the GRAPA community with experience in Telecom Fraud such  as Ade Banjoko who is Fraud Manager for Zain and member of the GSMA Fraud Committee. Garry Brown I have known personally for several years since we met at MTN Nigeria where he was the fraud manager. Pamela Noriega is a well known authority around the world. Jan VanDerSteen is our Consulting Fraud Expert from Ernst and Young in Belgium and Badee Awwad is from Palestine and MD Faizur Rashid from Malaysia.

These people make up our Fraud Committee and have provided us with direction and insight, and reviewed the curriculum as it has been prepared. The result is a comprehensive five day certification and training program that I will be talking about quite a bit for the next couple of weeks. Please understand that we are doing nothing to weaken or take away from the incredible momentum that we have started with GRAPA. The registrations and certification candidates for 2010 are already double of what they were in 2009, and we are offering complete programs as quickly as we can in as many venues as we can manage.

We want to start another initiative we hope will equal the GRAPA – Revenue Assurance initiative. There is a lot of overlap between revenue assurance, Internal Audit and Fraud, so clearly, there are a lot of training and approaches that can be utilized by both.

The Fraud program will offer a unique superset of skills, knowledge and approaches that are focused specifically on the needs of the Telco Fraud Officer. (I will talk about this job title in a future blog). For now, this blog is our first official announcement of the new Telco Fraud Officer program, and I hope our members who are forced to do both jobs (revenue assurance and Fraud), will find it useful and helpful in their careers.

For those who are not involved in Fraud, I hope that you will let your co-workers who specialize in the Fraud area know about the program, so they can check it out for themselves.

I am very excited about our new fraud program, and I hope you will see the incredible amount of work that has gone into its development, and the immense value it will deliver to our fraud focused members.

As I said, I’ll be writing more about this program soon, but for today, I think that covers it. Until next time, this is Rob Mattison saying…be fraud aware and be safe.