With more people working from anywhere, is fraud on the rise?

“If you bring someone who is simply not qualified, who does not have the skills, was misrepresenting themselves as having the skills, then that also becomes quickly apparent to the rest of the team,” said Alan Mak, partner and national practice leader, forensic disputes and investigations, financial advisory services at BDO Canada.

There is also a financial penalty to be accounted for if the wrong candidate is hired, said Chris Harper, CEO of ZippedScript, an education verifying software service.

“The time that goes along with the training, the commitment, only to have you find out later that you’ve got somebody who’s not trustworthy — that can bleed into losing a client, losing business. If you’re a publicly traded company and somebody in the C-suite, when people find out they’re lying, that’s going to affect stock price [and] you lose tons of money.”

‘The problem is getting bigger’

Background checks are a valuable way to address the issue, but with the rise in remote working, more organizations are looking to save on labour costs by looking globally — and that brings new risks.

“Hiring people cross-border now is becoming really popular, especially in tech, because the same employee that costs $150,000 in the United States or Canada, if you go to Malaysia or go overseas, you can get that same employee, same quality of work… but what happens with that, when you go overseas, is it’s complicated to do background checks. The problem is getting bigger,” said Harper.