Just a heads up, I’ve been reading a lot of articles in Google News lately on hedge funds and have noticed many familiar manager names popping up. There are a lot of new articles coming out saying that a manager is either a.) not doing well b.) doing well or c.) commenting on the market turmoil.
I’m guessing that people in the fund of funds industry (our clients) are also reading the media too and are more likely to know if you omitted a recent media article in a report. To combat this, I’ve started doing a Google News search on top of the standard Google search. This seems to check for the most recently published articles.
With the influx of updates, they are probably looking for just this kind of information.
I had a report recently where we went to confirm employment. When searching for company contact information, I realized that my subject had worked at two of the same companies at the same time as a fraudster. The fraudster had worked at one company, then went on to found his own firm in the 1980s. In the early 1980s, he was indicted. At the time he was out of the country and never came back.
There was no connection to my subject, other than they worked at the same seemingly small company, and then my subject went on to work at the company that the fraudster had started. He also appears to have worked at this company during the time that the fraudster committed the crimes that the US Govt accused him of.
I had a hard time deciding how to report that information. Ultimately I decided that the best thing to do was to provide details on the criminal activity and simply report that my subject had worked at the same companies during the same time as the fraudster.
The Channel Islands are a cluster of islands in the English Channel, and are often used by the UK investment industry the same way that the Bahamas are used by the US. In attempting to verify that a UK company was also doing business out of Jersey (one of the islands), I found the following link to the Jersey Financial Services Commission: http://www.jerseyfsc.org/index.asp
Once there, click on the links at the top of the page (I found this particular company under the “Funds” tab.) Then click on “Regulated Entities”. From there you can either look through a list or search for a particular name. While browsing, I saw several entities associated with companies that we have investigated before.
I’m not sure how often we will be able to utilize this, but it might be a nice addition to our UK reports.
While updating the database, I have come across a few reports which state that degree verifications are still pending. It has always been my practice to avoid archiving such reports until I receive the verification from the school, as it is easy to lose track of the status of a report once it has been archived. If I haven’t heard back from the university after a few days, I will call the client to let them know that the degree is still pending, and I give them the option to have the report uploaded as is with the promise that the report will be updated as soon as the verification is received.
Perhaps we should all hold off on archiving reports until all parts of the investigation are complete.
To what extent is media used to confirm an individual’s past employment with a company?
My rule of thumb is to only use media articles wherein the individual is referred to as being from a particular company. If the article also states that the individual was previously with another company, I will use that as well.
My issue in regards to confirming past employment with media pertains to online bios. I tend to disregard employment information included due to the fact that these online bios are often the same bio provided to us by the client. I generally find these online bios to be very unreliable as far as confidently confirming past employments. Any opposing opinions?
Use caution when simply bringing forward information from a past report. I’ve just started one where it appears that the education was never verified, and although the manager reported prior employment at two places we can easily verify automatically, no records were found either. All the old report consisted of was an address history. After doing some digging, I was able to find the correct person that matched the bio.
I’d advise to be suspicious of such reports, and orient yourself with how the prior investigator came to the conclusion that their person matched the subject.
I have been working on a report which entailed performing two degree verifications. While one (an MBA) came back positive, a verification request for the undergrad degree came back negative. I contacted the client to let them know, and today received an email from the manager being investigated. He gave me additional information (ie his last name actually consists of two names, which I was unaware of as most of the sources I utilized only had one last name displayed for him). I resubmitted the request, but felt a little uncomfortable replying to the manager and instead sent an email to the client only, stating that a new verification request was being processed. Does anyone have an opinion on communicating with the target of an investigation?
I have received nothing but positive feedback on our new practice of contacting clients when detrimental records are found on a manager and/or company. However I ran into an interesting situation today, where the client had ordered a quick access report along with a new report. A detrimental record was found during the previous investigation of the individual, which the client saw when viewing the quick access report. My question is, should we still contact the client about a detrimental record found if they are already aware of this from viewing a quick access report? (For the record, I still contacted the client.)
I recently submitted a report on a commoned named manager (by which I mean the likes of “John Smith”). This individual’s address history report indicated that he had worked with a neurological services office. I considered that perhaps the manager had worked as a secretary during college, or even that he was currently on the board of directors, etc. The record indicated a high confidence match with the neorological service and my subject, so I included it in the report.
Lo and behold, it was an erroneous match. The client came back to with a questioning look (it was visible could over the phone, trust me) and so I scoured New York City medical office listings, trying to find a neurosurgeon by the name of my manager. After I found a match, I was able to return to the client and explain the uncommon nature of the error.
Moral: address history employment matches, even if they report a high confidence match, aren’t gospel!
When it comes to non-automated employment verification requests, I was curious. How many calls are we willing to make to a non-responsive HR director? How often should we be calling? And when it comes to international requests, which are usually handled via fax, how many days are to pass without communication before we can close the report out?
It may be helpful to develop a standard, not only for us, but so our clients know how tenaciously we are pursuing these verifications.