Asia Pacific investigations capability survey

Key insights:

• Nearly two-thirds of respondents are not confident or neutral that their investigation capabilities adequately cater to the risks their organisation faces. An investigations function needs to be dynamic by having an overall purpose and strategy to ensure effectiveness in understanding, evaluating and responding to risks faced by the organisation.
• 26% of respondents think that the current structure of their investigations function is not effective in conducting investigations, while 27% are neutral. Factors that contribute to an investigations function being ineffective include lack of influence and resource and cost limitations.
• Only 19% of organisations are confident that their current training programme meets the needs of their investigators. Reasons include the content not being detailed or lacking industry specific content. Organisations may want to consider other supplementary avenues for training to address this, including an accredited corporate investigator training programme. The ACi is currently developing foundation qualifications for the corporate investigator.
• Only 23% of respondents said that people within their organisation feel comfortable in ‘speaking up’ in respect to the actions of peers or superiors and only 42% feel comfortable when it concerns employees in junior roles. This may indicate a lack of confidence by employees in their organisation’s whistleblowing process due to either inaction from management or fear of retaliation. An independent and objective investigations function can play an important role in promoting a culture of speaking up by demonstrating timely and objective follow-up of complaints and helping to ensure appropriate safeguards are in place to protect the identity of the whistleblower.
• Whilst most organisations surveyed are either already using or are considering using data analytics as part of their investigative work, only 19% said that their data analytics capability was mature. In order to generate the required insights from an investigation and with increasing volumes of data, investigations functions should look to expand their data capabilities, including scalability of current systems to handle big data.