JGL Forensic Services - Where Integrity and Business Meet

Fifteen years in prison.
That is the maximum sentence the draft Protected Disclosures Bill attaches to subjecting a whistleblower to occupational detriment. Under the Act currently in force, doing the same thing carries no criminal consequence at all. And the liability does not sit neatly with the organisation. It attaches to the individual who handled the report.
Close to a third of fraud tips never reach your hotline. They arrive as a quiet word with a line manager, in a corridor, off the record. Under the new Bill, that quiet word starts a legal clock that runs out in five days. The Act you are currently working to gives you 21 days just to acknowledge receipt.
There is also one provision that has attracted far less attention than the rest, which removes a disclosure from your control the moment it is logged. If a disclosure arrived at your organisation this morning naming a member of your executive, could you name the person who should receive it?
 
Click below to read the full article so that you and your team understand the implications and penalties relating to the new Bill.
https://lnkd.in/gansZ_qk
 
#Whistleblowing #CorporateGovernance #ProtectedDisclosuresBill #FraudRisk #SouthAfricanBusiness

By the time most fraud investigations deliver their final report, the assets are stripped, the evidence is wiped, and the perpetrators have resigned with clean records.The report arrives. The guilty are gone.There's a name for this approach: governance by autopsy. And if your company treats forensic investigations as documents to be finalised before anyone acts, you're practising it right now.South Africa's commissions of inquiry made this model famous. More than R1 billion spent on State Capture alone, with painfully little to show for it. But one current commission is quietly breaking the mould, securing suspensions and prosecutions while its hearings are still underway.What it's doing differently holds direct lessons for your boardroom, and you don't need to wait for a scandal to apply them.So ask yourself: is your company investigating to act, or investigating to file a report?Click below to read the full article.https://lnkd.in/gHJ6gxXR#CorporateGovernance #ForensicInvestigation #Corruption #RiskManagement #SouthAfrica

SAPS paid a politically connected supplier more than R50 million before the contract was cancelled.The man now facing charges for failing to stop it is the National Police Commissioner himself.He is not an isolated case. In the same eighteen-month window, two Hawks officers stand accused of trying to bury evidence in a double murder investigation, and the head of IDAC, the state's lead anti-corruption prosecuting unit, is the subject of a criminal complaint over a conflict of interest she has admitted handling badly.The police. The prosecutors. The anti-corruption unit. All three under examination at once.None of these officials has been convicted, and each denies wrongdoing. But if your governance model rests on "the authorities are on it," these cases are reason to run the numbers again. The article shows how the only layer of assurance your company owns outright is the one you build yourself.Click below to read the full article.#ForensicServices #CorporateGovernance #FraudRisk #SouthAfrica #Accountability

R100,000. That's all it takes to turn your silence into a criminal offence.Since April 2024, a section of PRECCA has made it a crime for anyone in a position of authority to sit on knowledge, or even suspicion, of fraud above that threshold. Not misconduct. Not negligence. A criminal offence, even if you never touched a cent.Yet outside legal and compliance circles, almost nobody knows this law exists.And the reporting duty is only half of it. The law also expects you to have taken "reasonable measures" to prevent corruption in the first place, including by your third-party contractors. What counts as reasonable? The law doesn't say yet.The article breaks down exactly who must report, to whom, the six principles our courts are likely to borrow from the UK, and two red flags hiding in your own data right now. One involves an employee who hasn't taken a single day of leave in three years.If a contractor committed fraud on your behalf last month, would you know? And could you prove you tried to stop it?Click below to read the full article so you know what is coming.#PRECCA #CorporateGovernance #FraudPrevention #ForensicInvestigation #PersonalLiability

Nine weeks. That's how long it took one board to suspend a CEO, run a full forensic investigation, and conclude a disciplinary hearing for gross misconduct. Four of those weeks were paused for medical leave.The institution had produced clean audits year after year. The paperwork was immaculate. The transactions behind it were anything but. Funds diverted, procurement rules bypassed, internal controls deliberately switched off.Afrika Msimang chaired that board. In her article, she writes about what accountability actually cost her: being outvoted by fellow directors, a minister who delayed the investigation, an audit firm that admitted it had "assisted with the process", and a media campaign that dismissed her fiduciary role as derivative of her husband's job title.Her conclusion is uncomfortable for anyone hiding behind "due process": if a disciplinary process can be concluded in nine weeks, what does it say about the ones that take years, while suspended executives draw full salaries?Is your organisation using procedure to deliver results, or to avoid them?Click below to read the full article.https://lnkd.in/duC_XHfG#Governance #Accountability #PublicSector #ForensicInvestigation #Leadership

R30 million. That's what impersonation fraud cost the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa.Even the Daily Maverick was targeted. A WhatsApp message from a "senior official," profile picture and all, asked a staff member to make an urgent transfer. The official never sent it. The scammers had cloned his identity down to the last detail.That's the uncomfortable shift. Fraud used to announce itself: bad spelling, dodgy domains, clumsy invoices. Now criminals need just a few minutes of audio or video to clone a CEO's voice and face, and cases in South Africa jumped 356% in a single year.The fix isn't better software. It's better discipline. If your team would act on an urgent instruction from the boss without verifying it through a separate channel, your capital is exposed right now.Would your finance team pause and verify, or would hierarchy win?Click below to read the full article.https://lnkd.in/gy_cuJj3hashtag#ImpersonationFraud hashtag#Deepfakes hashtag#ForensicServices hashtag#CorporateGovernance hashtag#FraudPrevention

R7 billion. That's what ABB and McKinsey have paid South Africa to close the book on its biggest corporate corruption cases.A court might now order some of that money handed back.And the challenge doesn't come from a whistleblower or a watchdog. It comes from Matshela Koko, one of the men the settlements were meant to help hold accountable.If a R2.5 billion settlement, paid and banked in 2022, can still be unwound today, what is a settlement actually worth?Our latest article unpacks the court battle, who carries the risk if the deal collapses, and why your legacy contracts may hold the same exposure without anyone having gone looking for it.Neither ABB nor McKinsey uncovered these problems through their ordinary governance processes. Whistleblowers, foreign prosecutors and leaked documents forced the issue. By then, cooperating was no longer optional.Would your business survive that kind of discovery arriving from the outside?Click below to read the full article.https://lnkd.in/dhzbssQ6hashtag#ForensicServices hashtag#CorporateGovernance hashtag#FraudRisk hashtag#SouthAfrica hashtag#AntiCorruption

A simple call to get a power line fixed cost this resident R40,000, money she had to take out of her bond.That is the story of one Parkhurst resident extorted by people wearing City Power's authority but not its uniform. The R40, 000 was ostensibly for back payments she owed (she actually owed nothing), but she was told that she would not get her power back until she paid them.Her neighbour lost power for four days because her "reconnection" left them disconnected instead. A former employee says he has been extorted to the tune of R2.6 million since 2020, by people he names as his own former colleagues. He is now living with death threats against his children.This is not load shedding. This is not even ordinary corruption. This is City Power and Eskom workers using the grid itself as a weapon against the people who pay for it.Our latest article looks at what happens when public infrastructure becomes a tool for extortion, why the people meant to protect citizens are the ones preying on them, and what it will take to stop it.Click below to read the full article.https://lnkd.in/deeXucYF

Speaking up about fraud in South Africa can get you killed.Babita Deokaran was murdered for it. So were many others. Yet whistleblowers remain the single most effective weapon against corporate fraud, uncovering 45% of cases. External audits manage just 5%.Despite this, fewer than 15 countries in Africa have laws that properly protect the people who come forward. Most companies still run paper-based reporting systems that can't guarantee anonymity, and a third of whistleblowers report straight to a direct supervisor instead of a hotline. That means your company's defence against fraud often comes down to one manager's judgment call.Your business can have every compliance framework in place and still be exposed, because none of it works if the person who spots the fraud has nowhere safe to go.So ask yourself: if someone in your business spotted fraud tomorrow, would they risk everything to tell you, or would they stay quiet?Read the full article to see what's broken, and what real protection actually looks like.https://lnkd.in/eZyH3WGU

There is a reasonable chance that a fraud scheme is operating inside your organisation in South Africa right now. Many organisations focus heavily on creating controls while spending far less time assessing whether those controls can be manipulated, circumvented, or overridden by trusted insiders. They can and they are!It may not look dramatic from the outside. The payments may appear legitimate. The supporting documents may be in place. The approvals may look routine. The people involved may be trusted, experienced, and well-regarded. They may sit in finance, procurement, operations, or senior management. They may understand the control environment better than the people responsible for monitoring it.That is what makes modern occupational fraud so dangerous.Click below to read the full article:https://lnkd.in/dNUjJZNW