Background Checks, Antidote to Frauds in Public, Private Institutions

Culled from ThisDay newspaper of April 25, 2015

Corruption and fraud related cases have done a great damage to the Nigerian economy and these vices are manifested in public and private sectors. In the private sector, the negative impact is severe as it does not only eats into the revenue bases of the affected institutions, it also, in most cases, affects the integrity of whatever such companies stand for. However, Managing Director, Background Check International, Mr. Kola Olugbodi, in this encounter with Festus Akanbi, said doing background checks of employees is one of the best ways of keeping fraudsters at bay

Frauds in Public and Private Institutions

Avisit to any police station, these days, will show that fraud related cases are as high as those of other violent crimes. As company owners continue to battle with harvests of regulatory and other operational challenges, so also the issue of fraud among employees is constituting itself into a great threat to business survival in the country.

Providing an insight into the rising incidence of frauds in work places, the Managing Director of Background Check International, Mr. Kola Olugbodi, said the best antidote is to know the true identities of the workforce.

According to him, “The primary reason for the high incidence of frauds in institutions is because in Nigeria we take a lot of things at face value. It has been confirmed that in organisations close to 70 per cent of frauds that happen are traceable to the staff and one of the things we have found out is that many people are recruited based on face value. Nobody is asking for their past records, nobody is asking why such people left their previous places of work.

We need to always ask for the past records of the people we want to work with. This will help to nip future frauds in the bud.

“Organisations also need to put check and balances in place. In some of the companies we work for, part of what they want us to do is to investigate the lifestyles of some of their staff when they discover that some of them are beginning to live above their means. They just want to be sure. Does it mean he has hit a jackpot somewhere, or has he got some inheritance passed unto him? Many companies don’t really know the true identities of some of the officials put in some sensitive positions in their establishments. These are some of the things we have found out as background screeners.”

He continued, “There was a case of a medical doctor. This guy never finished from medical school. At the end of the day, he just showed up with an operating license, claiming that he graduated from a particular university in Nigeria and the guy was working in hospitals and had been moving from one hospital to the other. He ended up in a hospital where the medical director, who happened to be a professor, discovered his true identity. Because he regularly asked his doctors’ technical questions, especially on the types of medication and treatment given to patients, he was able to discover the guy’s real identity after he ran a background check on him. It was while doing this that he found out that this doctor wasn’t coherent. At the end of the day, he found out that the guy had dropped out of the university at 200 levels when he was advised to withdraw.

He apparently procured a fake licence which he had been using to work in many hospitals before he was eventually exposed. If you don’t have the requisite experience or knowledge you cannot give what you don’t have and this is why some people perform badly at work.”

Frauds in Banks

Explaining that operators in the banking industry are gradually embracing the culture of background check to curb fraudulent activities in their operations, Olugbodi said, “A large percentage of banks in Nigeria now do background checks if not virtually every one of them. We service a large percentage of them. I want to believe that the issue of frauds will actually begin to reduce. It is a fundamental thing because of the way banks have been structured but gradually, things are changing. What is more rampant now is more of electronic frauds and one of our advices to banks is the need to be sure of the credibility and caliber of people that handle electronic channels and department. But compared to the past, I think the incidence of frauds is gradually reducing maybe it is because they are now doing background check for some of their new employees.”

Claim Verification

Another service being rendered by the company is claim verifications. Olugbodi explained that “This has to do with the service we render to insurance firms because they need to verify some claims made by some of their policy holders.

It is a purely investigation service we render to them and that is an area that is still new in Nigeria. Insurance companies in Nigeria are not handling claim verification in a professional way yet. What I’m saying is that more insurance companies need to outsource the issue of claims verification to professionals. Over time, it has been discovered that there is collusion between their subscribers and some of their staff. It’s a matter of heads or tail, the company is usually the loser.”

New Government

He pointed out that “The in-coming government needs to pay attention into making things work in Nigeria instead of paying lip services. One thing that is important to our own industry is to see that the National ID card scheme becomes a reality in Nigeria and not just a lip service. This project should work. We need to know ourselves in Nigeria. We need to have a universal record system. The way it is done in even other smaller African countries. We can also have it here if we are sincere with it and we see the need for it and I think there is a need for it. What INEC has done with the permanent voters card is a very remarkable thing in the country. It has helped in gauging how the election was conducted. Although we all agree that we may not have had something perfect encouraging. We have started well.

“Government needs to ensure that the culture of background check is entrenched in every aspect of our economy, including our schools.

Poor Data Culture

He said that access to data is one big challenge facing the company. According to him, “This is because, most of the information we have in most of our higher institutions and other government institutions are still in the manual format. So to get information from these sources usually entail going through piles of paper documents and this most times, affect the turnaround time. However, this has reduced because people are now embracing electronic documentation. It’s obvious people never thought of background check that will be coming to them for information almost on hourly basis. However, in the last 10 years, one thing that we have discovered is that most schools have tried to reorganise their manual records to make it easier for them to retrieve information that we need.

“One of the things we are doing is to keep advising institutions to try to make their data to be in electronic format, which will make it easier for anybody trying to retrieve information from them whether at home or from any other country abroad.

Operations in the past 10 years

Speaking on the company’s journey so far in the past 10 years, Olugbodi said Background Check International indeed blazed the trail. “We blazed the trail in this industry some 10 years ago and our primary focus is to offer premium service to corporate organisations and government agencies.

In Nigeria, no man can ever be an island. Presently, we have some other companies that are also into background screening business as we speak.

“Initially, it was an uphill task. Many people were skeptical. Many people were getting to know about background check’s role for the first time, what was popular then was to see the police or other security agents go about asking questions. So, when Background Check started in Nigeria at the initial stage, the skepticism was there. What we started with was employment background check, which entails getting background information on new intakes and current staff of organisations and of course, that would entail us conducting things like family background and educational qualifications to verify the authenticity of their claims. This entails getting information from places where they previously worked, their references and checking with police to ascertain if such people do not have criminal record.

“Initially, going round and trying to gather these kinds of information on staff of organisations brought a lot of skepticism and of course the other issue is that Nigerian companies themselves were not easily disposed to background check. It was alien to them but over time and due to our continuous sensitisation efforts, including publications and awareness campaigns, many of them started responding although on a low scale. But with time, it really gathered momentum and as we speak now it is almost a taboo for organizations in Nigeria not to run background checks on their staff.

Relationship with Police, Courts

“The greatest relationship we have with them is the fact that the police are the main custodians of criminal records in Nigeria and so if you really want to be sure if anybody has criminal record or background, the best place you can always approach is the police station and of course in cases where we carry out litigation checks, it always takes us to the registry department of courts. These are the things we do with courts and then police. All other things that we do at Background Checks take us to higher institutions. Over the past 10 years, we have developed relationship with the police and courts across Nigeria.”

Background

Olugbodi graduated from Obafemi Awolowo University Ile-Ife in 1988 as a demographer and social statistician.

“I’m the first African member of the National Association of Professional Background Screeners, which is based in the US. I’m also a member of ASIS, (- a security organization) which is also based in the US. I’m also a member of Association of Certified Fraud Examiners and back home in Nigeria; I’m a member of the Institute of Industrial Security. All these give me the skill to really go into what we are doing.

“In this organisation over the years, we have as members of staff people that have background in the military, police force, legal services and agencies and this is one of the things that I can say have been responsible for the record.

“My first job experience is with the National Population Commission as a population statistician after which I moved into the banking industry before I joined the human resources area of business. The human resources business which has to do with recruitment was actually what gave birth to Background Check. This is because when we started the recruitment organisation, one of the questions we continued to ask ourselves was how could we vouch for the credibility of the candidates we were sourcing for our clients and some of them actually asked us that in spite of the impressive performance of these job seekers, could we vouch for the credibility of the certificates of these applicants.

In most cases, we were caught napping because that was not part of our briefs as at that time. We just did recruitment. So we felt we needed to add background check into it in order to be sure of the credibility of the resume and of course that was what gave birth to what we are doing presently.”

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