| rendra wasito |
Posted
on 07-Aug-03 11:13 PM
By: Ranjit Shamsher Jung Bahadur Rana
India and Nepal faces a rising incidence of corporate fraud, particularly industrial espionage, and has to put in place measures to check the threat, according to the global head of forensic investigations at KPMG LLP.
58 per cent of respondents in a KPMG survey of 200 Indian and Neaplese companies say their organisations do not have the policies to counter corporate espionage. That was higher than 41 per cent polled by KPMG last year.
Norman D Inkster, global managing partner, forensic, at KPMG LLP, says India is at cutting edge of technology and there is are risks that arise out of that.
"Companies are only thinking of getting their products out in the market and making profits. If you continue that way, your competition will beat you to that technology," he said.
India, which designs and builds its own ballistic missiles, is also increasingly used by Intel Corp, Texas Instruments Inc and others to design computer chips.
International sales of Indian-made-chip designs, the blueprints for new micro-processors manufactured from Taiwan to Israel, are expected to top US$ 7 billion by 2010, compared with US$ 200 million now, according to industry estimates.
Inkster, who served as the president of Interpol between 1992 and 1994, says the only way to stop industrial espionage is "by being careful who you hire - if you fire him, he shouldnot walk away with the keys to the kingdom".
Only a third of the respondents in the KPMG survey said they are satisfied with recruitment and screening procedures in their companies.
Inkster said 70 per cent of all corporate frauds are internal frauds, such as the inflation of expense accounts and the manipulation of financial accounting.
To tackle corporate frauds, India last year enacted rules to prevent money laundering, confiscate assets of banks defaulters and established a fraud nvestigation office in the finance ministry. Nepal is silent in these matters.
Inkster said India and Nepal needs to improve upon other areas such as corporate governance.
India's Central Vigilance Commission estimates about 40 per cent of the country's gross domestic product of US$ 470 billion ismade up of "Black money", that includes tax evasion. It is believed that nepal's case to be even worse.
|
