Kickback

The accountant is one of the most influential positions whose work contributes much to the company's success. Unfortunately, accountants are also the employees who are caught on scams and frauds the most frequently.

Kickbacks are one of the most popular accounting frauds. In many businesses, the responsibility of ordering certain goods and services for the office lies with the accountant. The unscrupulous accountant uses their position to choose less favourable conditions for the company in exchange for a reward from the contractor for themselves. Unfortunately, one of our clients fell for such a fraud.

The client's small insurance company provided its employees with coffee, tea and pastries in the office. The duty of buying those goods was entrusted to the company's accountant, and she did that job perfectly for years. No one would suspect anything if the company director did not install CleverControl on the office computers. The ultimate purpose of monitoring was to find out slackers - the director suspected some employees were not as busy and hardworking as they tried to seem. He certainly did not expect to uncover a kickback scheme in his office.

When the director reviewed daily reports, a record of the email from the accountant's computer caught his attention. In the email, the accountant asked to raise the price tag for coffee more and assured the recipient the boss would not notice. The director checked the accountant's screen recording for that period and saw that the email went to the manager of the company that supplied them with tea and coffee. Further discreet investigation revealed that the manager was the accountant's friend and owned the supplier company. The manager had been selling tea and coffee at inflated prices for nineteen months and shared the increase with the accountant. The director trusted his accountant and did not double-check procurement prices, and his trust turned against him. If CleverControl did not capture that email, the kickback could continue for years.

Monitoring with CleverControl also revealed a few productivity problems. The director's suspicions were confirmed - two employees habitually wasted a few hours daily on Tiktok or shopping websites instead of working. The manager turned on CleverControl's site-blocking feature to limit distractions at work.

• Email monitoring

  The program key logs outgoing emails, thanks to which the director learned about the ongoing kickback scheme.
• Tracking visited websites

  The history of visited websites allowed the director to reveal some employees' productivity problems.
• Site blocking

  Blocking distractions such as shopping and entertainment websites helped employees focus on their work.