Behaviour that can signal staff fraud in a practice
The behaviours the ACFE links to the costliest staff frauds, and what an advice practice owner can do on seeing them without accusing anyone.
By Achekam · · 4 min read · For Financial services businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya
Staff fraud in a small practice rarely starts with a stranger. It starts with the trusted bookkeeper who has been there for years, the office manager who "handles everything" with suppliers, the adviser whose clients only ever want to deal with him. When it comes to light, colleagues often say the same thing: looking back, there were signs, but nobody wanted to read them that way.
Those signs are behavioural, and the ACFE, the professional association of fraud examiners, tracks them. This article explains which behaviours its latest report links to the largest losses, how a practice owner in South Africa, Nigeria or Kenya can respond without turning the office into a place of suspicion, and the controls that make the signs matter less.
What the ACFE's report measures
The ACFE's Occupational Fraud 2026: A Report to the Nations, its 14th edition, is based on 2,402 real cases of occupational fraud from 143 countries and territories across 22 major industry categories. Occupational fraud means fraud committed by people against the organisations that employ them.
Among other things, the report looks at the behaviour of fraudsters before they were caught, and at how the losses varied with that behaviour. The ACFE's Report to the Nations page summarises the findings and offers the full report.
The red flags linked to the largest losses
The report lists the behavioural red flags with the highest median losses. In US dollars, as the ACFE reports them:
| Behavioural red flag | Median loss |
|---|---|
| Excessive pressure from within the organisation | $532,000 |
| Past legal problems | $400,000 |
| Unusually close with a vendor or customer | $300,000 |
| Refusal to take vacations | $250,000 |
| A "wheeler-dealer" attitude | $250,000 |
These are global median figures from the cases studied, not South African, Nigerian or Kenyan amounts. Their value for a small practice is in the ranking: they show which behaviours have been linked to the most expensive frauds.
Reading the signs in an advice practice
Each of these can look ordinary in a busy practice, which is why they are easy to miss.
- Pressure from within. A partner who demands growth at any cost, or targets that cannot be met honestly, can push people towards shortcuts. This one points at management as much as staff.
- Closeness to a supplier or client. The staff member who insists on using one courier, one IT contractor or one printer, and resists getting other quotes. Or the adviser who handles one client's affairs so personally that nobody else is allowed to see the file.
- Never taking leave. The bookkeeper who has not had a full week off in years and comes in even when ill. Dedication is the usual explanation, but someone who cannot let anyone else open the books for a week may have a reason.
- The wheeler-dealer. Someone who treats rules as obstacles, enjoys working around procedures and is always arranging special deals.
None of these proves anything. Most people who show them are honest. The right response is not an accusation but a control that would expose a problem if there were one.
Make leave a control
The cheapest anti-fraud control in a small practice is a holiday. When the person who normally processes payments or reconciles the bank is away, someone else does that work, and a scheme that depends on daily concealment tends to surface.
Achekam's payroll keeps annual, sick, family responsibility and unpaid leave with monthly accrual. A line manager approves their own team's leave, and nobody approves their own. That gives the owner a simple report to watch: who has a growing leave balance and has not taken a proper break. Make it a practice rule that everyone in a finance or payment role takes at least one continuous block of leave each year, and plan in advance who covers their duties.
Check patterns, not people
When a sign worries you, look at the transactions rather than confronting the person.
- The ledger and trial balance. Achekam's general ledger lists every posted line, and the trial balance shows each account for all time, for a period or at a date. Look at the supplier and expense accounts the person controls: unexpected growth, round amounts, or payments to suppliers nobody else recognises.
- Procurement patterns. A procurement integrity review, sold as its own add-on, raises questions about warning patterns such as competing quotes sharing contact or bank details, or a supplier paid into an employee's bank account. It raises questions for a person to follow up; it does not conclude anything. One limit to know: its check for purchases split under a threshold does nothing until a threshold is set, and the app cannot set one.
How to split duties so that no single person controls a transaction end to end is covered in separating duties in a small advice practice, and what a sole adviser can do when there is nobody to split them with is in running the books as a one-adviser practice.
Controls and the tone at the top
The ACFE's report states that the presence of anti-fraud controls is associated with lower fraud losses and quicker fraud detection. Controls only work, though, if the people at the top take them seriously. Investopedia explains that the control environment, set by the board and management leading by example, establishes for all employees the importance of integrity and a commitment to rooting out improprieties, including fraud. An owner who skips the approval steps they impose on everyone else is telling staff the steps do not matter.
When to bring in outside help
If a pattern in the books cannot be explained innocently, stop investigating informally. Preserve the records, limit who knows, and speak to your external accountant and a lawyer before you speak to the employee. A forensic accountant can examine the evidence properly, and a badly handled conversation can destroy it. Until then, the best thing the owner can do is keep the controls running exactly as normal.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
