One-third of Indian businesses hit hard by internal, external fraud: Report

Nearly a third of Indian businesses experienced frauds by internal as well as external parties in the last 12 months, with data theft being the top most fraud event, says a report.

According to Kroll's annual global fraud and risk report, 33 per cent of Indian companies suffered reputational damage due to third parties, while the global figure stood at 29 per cent.

The highest incidence of fraud was by way of data theft with nearly 41 per cent of Indian firms affected by it in the last 12 months, compared to the global average of just 29 per cent.

As per the report, the main areas of concern for India going forward will be the growing risk from data theft (84 per cent), reputational damage due to third-party relationships (81 per cent) and adversarial social media activity (81 per cent).

These are ranked as the top three risk priorities that respondents are focusing on when developing a risk mitigation strategy for their organisations.

"We believe that the level of due diligence done by Indian corporates is improving, but it is still below the basic requirement when compared globally," said Tarun Bhatia, head of South Asia and managing director in the Business Intelligence and Investigations practice of Kroll.

Bhatia further said there has been a cultural shift as incidents of disclosure of frauds by firms have gone up in India.

While this is a welcome change, it also brings forth the need for sustainable solutions, better mechanisms, greater enforcement and governance architecture to improve the state of risk mitigation in the country," he said adding "companies also need to put in place a lot of checks and balances while recruiting, on boarding vendors, forming partnerships etc."