Privately held business - Mitigating fraud risk and designing robust management systems

Grant Thornton Bharat and Avendus Wealth Management organised to a webinar on Mitigating fraud risk and designing robust management systems for family offices and family held businesses with the objective to design effective management control systems.

Privately owned businesses and large family offices have a team of advisors that play the role of trusted lieutenants and are often entrusted with the responsibility of monitoring business affairs, assets, and growing investments. In more evolved family offices, charters and key objectives are well-defined and professional advisors work closely with families to achieve the stated objectives. While advisors focus on your wealth objectives, who is evaluating the vulnerabilities in your set up? Is your business susceptible to fraud – whether human or tech-based?

There are several cases of high-profile frauds amongst large corporates that have come into the limelight, but family offices and family-owned businesses tend to be discreet. As many instances show, vulnerabilities can exist, and be exploited even in the most robust of systems for several reasons. These include multiple people with access to personal cash and assets, centralisation of decision making in the hands of a few individuals, lack of a strong control framework and absence of periodic fraud risk assessment, amongst others.

Family offices must be cognisant of this threat and should introduce adequate systems and processes, which can give timely warnings as well as define protocols to address such issues.

With Grant Thornton Bharat’s expertise in managing forensic audit of some of the biggest ‘frauds’ in corporate India, the webinar aimed to touch upon steps that business owners can take to optimally manage an agency and the risks related to delegating personal affairs to retainers and family office. The engaging webinar saw our experts highlight the importance of adopting adequate oversight for family offices to minimise risk.