Background
A Spanish building materials company was well aware of its industry specific risk exposure to the second oldest profession in the world. The Spanish were active in many high-risk countries with their own subsidiaries and, despite existing functional compliance management systems, there were sometimes regular and systematic violations of corporate policies and laws. Again and again, senior executives and local managing directors were also involved, or did not sufficiently observe or comply with the appropriate supervisory and control functions.
The compliance department at the Spanish headquarters always acted immediately, but in some cases only detected the violations after months or even years.
Task
REMARKABLE Forensics was engaged to forensically secure the company's IT devices as each senior employee departed, and to keep them available for possible further investigation. This protocol was also necessary when replacing devices. Every employee had a smartphone and a laptop, and the number of devices to be secured was around 60 smartphones and 40 laptops per year.
In addition, the client wanted emails and chat logs to be regularly backed up, and encrypted with special forensics software in future.
Findings
Every year, of the 100 secured devices, only about 8 were examined in more detail. The data could be made available for analysis within 48 hours. In addition to proving the misconduct of the suspected person, a special focus was always placed on other potential participants, who could also be included in the investigation. The analyses themselves were performed using specialized eDiscovery software and multilingual review experts. Predictive coding algorithms were also increasingly being used, especially for large amounts of data.
Results
Through the consistent, regular and court-admissable backup of data, considerable time and cost were saved. The engagement of REMARKABLE Forensics as an independent third party also ensured that the data was only accessed in the event of a justified suspicion.
Cooperation with auditors and law firms will also be considerably simplified in future, as they can request the information they require directly from REMARKABLE Forensics and, if necessary, also receive immediate access to relevant documents. Direct employees of the Spanish construction group are hardly involved in this process, which considerably reduces their workload.