Forensic Services

Prepare for and respond to crisis

When companies are properly prepared, a crisis can actually present an opportunity to emerge stronger. We believe that in order to emerge stronger from crisis, companies must:

• Prepare
• Ground their response in the facts
• Establish governance via a cross-functional core team that combines communications, legal, and operational functions
• Understand their constituents and be authentic in their response
• Dedicate energy during crisis to “looking around the corner” for both risks and opportunities
• Take action on what was learned

We’re PwC's Crisis Management Team. We’ll work beside you to help you prepare for, respond to, and recover from a crisis. So you can confront it, withstand it and emerge stronger.

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Manage claims and dispute

According to estimates, India has seen a rise in disputes arising out of increased business activity

In today’s business world, a dispute can take many forms, for instance, it could be delays in a capital project, joint venture setbacks or a major insurance claim. According to estimates, India has seen a rise in disputes arising out of increased business activity. Besides tarnishing reputation, disputes can disrupt the business foundation, resulting in project delays, funds shortage, blocking of monies and loss of business opportunities. Disruptions arising from unplanned events can pose significant challenges to specific performance of contracts. From repudiation of contracts to increased time and cost overruns, an organisation can be significantly tied down to interventions – mediations, arbitration or litigation.

Companies will probably take a long and practical look at the costs/benefits of both making and disputing claims before making financial commitments to their resolution process.

PwC’s Dispute Advisory team comes with deep experience, in-depth skills and capabilities to provide independent expert opinion in business, technical, financial and commercial aspects of complex disputes and unsuccessful business arrangements.

This team has been the pioneer in emerging as strategic advisors to senior management, legal counsels and legal practitioners while helping them dissect and settle situations of conflict and disagreement between stakeholders.

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Complete data management with collection, transfer, backup, validation, processing, hosting and production of data. Ensuring data integrity and security at each stage powered by well-established protocols across people, process, and technology aspects of the solution.To address the particular needs, we can create tailored workflows, giving our clients access to the necessary data and a quicker turnaround time.

The rise in regulatory inquiries and internal probes in recent years has made data more important than ever before. The digital world has significantly transformed, with the amount of unstructured and complicated data owned by businesses increasing at an exponential rate. This has had an impact on how businesses store, manage and retrieve data, particularly during times of crisis. With our comprehensive e-discovery solutions, you can identify, preserve, gather and produce electronic documents in a consistent, defensible and cost-effective manner – ranging from data collection to document review to evidence evaluation.

Our area of expertise includes  regulatory investigations under the FCPA, anti-bribery matters,  subpoena requests,  corporate investigations and  contract review.

Our service offerings include identification, preservation, collection, processing and assessment of structured and unstructured data, document review services (including first-level and second-level review of electronically-stored Information), production and reporting (evidence repository, collation of issue tracker), foreign language translation capabilities and litigation and review support to counsel.

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The risk landscape of entities in India are more volatile than ever. With new and more impactful threats brewing, external fraudsters are emerging as a bigger threat.

PwC India’s Forensic Investigation Practice is home to a diverse team of adept and agile professionals. Our expertise can help you minimise and manage your organisational risks. We provide a wide range of services entailing corporate fraud investigations, fact-finding reviews, privileged consulting, bribery and corruption reviews among others. We are here to guide you, acting as your trusted advisor.

In today's dynamic business environment, organisations often face the threat of having vulnerable controls which could be overridden by a fraudster. With the advent of new working styles along with an increased focus on digital platforms, organisations have started observing a rise in cyber attacks, violation of policies, KYC failures, etc. along with increased risks of misconduct by employees and third parties.

As per the Global Economic Crime and Fraud Survey 2022, 52% of Indian organisations experienced some form of fraud or other economic crime within the last 24 months, as opposed to 69% in our 2020 survey. The top five frauds faced by Indian companies are customer fraud (47%), Know Your Customer (KYC) failure fraud (34%), procurement fraud (26%), cybercrime (45%) and tax fraud (28%). The main perpetrators of such fraud schemes constituted 43% of external perpetrators, 33% of internal perpetrators and 24% a collusion between internal and external perpetrators.

One of the key measures of fraud prevention includes performing a process/entity level fraud risk assessment that involves a thorough review along with established controls in order to assess the robustness or vulnerability to various kinds of fraud schemes. It is a proactive assessment adopted by an organisation to assess the overall exposure to fraud as well as the risks and efficacy of controls and helps the organisation prepare a plan to mitigate all such risks and misconducts. Since fraud affects the bottom line of the company, it is important to test and enhance the preventive and detective controls at regular intervals to safeguard the company's assets from all types of fraud risks. Although fraud risks cannot be prevented completely, organisation, a strong anti-fraud culture helps organisations minimise the risk of fraud to a larger extent. PwC’s Forensic team consists of sector experts with vast expertise that assists companies perform such assessments and safeguard from risks of fraud and misconduct.

The evolving corporate landscape has increased the importance and complexity of IT infrastructure and associated data. While it has served as a boon in bringing in efficiency and productivity as compared to a paperbound world, it has also increased the risk of vulnerability and fraud.

In today’s digital world cybercrimes, frauds, and other legal violations are on the rise. They are also the leading cause for business disruptions in organisations. In such situations we help uncover facts by utilising scientific and technological methods to minimise the impact, contain and remediate by accessing and analysing important data in a manner that is reliable, admissible, and defensible.

Anti-money laundering and sanctions advisory.

In today’s business environment, financial institutions face tremendous regulatory, operational, and reputational risks and penalties for non-compliance with anti-money laundering (AML) and sanctions regulations.

Despite increased spending on AML processes, implementing compliant and standardised AML operations across geographies remains a challenge.

PwC assists its clients with handling complex financial crime matters related to money laundering, terrorist financing, and economic sanctions by developing, implementing, and maintaining all aspects of effective AML/sanctions programs. We offer financial crime solutions coupled with an in-depth understanding of regulatory requirements and expectations, built on innovative technologies and sustainable operating models.

Business opportunities have certain risks associated with them. Integrity and due-diligence helps in uncovering these risks involved in dealing with unknown business partners, and thereby mitigating them.

Forensic Intelligence includes gathering public domain information and market intelligence on business partners, potential investee companies, and third parties to assess business risks. These risks may include engaging with sanctioned entities, defaulting companies, or a debarred promoter. Engaging with such third parties may cause a loss of reputation and trust. As a result, investors/ business partners require insights into the background, business conduct, capability of the organisation and promoters, respectively. Using our extensive network of intelligence specialists, and access to open source and subscribed databases, we help our clients in making informed decisions.

Financial crime prevention and detection is quickly becoming one of the most difficult tasks for financial institutions, affecting not just monetary losses but also reputation, brand, culture, relationships, and regulatory censure. Our integrated approach to mitigating financial crime risks not only protects your organisation, but also gives it the confidence it needs to keep going forward courageously.

Our financial crimes unit integrates technology, regulatory and investigative financial crimes, anti-money laundering, sanctions, fraud, and anti-bribery/anti-corruption expertise to perform vulnerability assessments, compliance programme evaluations, as well as gap analyses to assist clients in reducing money-laundering and sanctions exposure, implementing operational solutions, and improving overall risk management.

We specialise in assisting financial institutions in leveraging technology to provide effective, efficient, and long-term light-weight analytical solutions for operational efficiency, enhanced fraud detection, and decreased AML/sanctions programmes.

In order to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements and/or with the laid down company policies, it is important to get an outside-in perspective to ensure a neutral eye view on the status of compliance. Moveover, in white collar crime investigations, one of the crucial aspects is to identify, assess and locate the proceeds of crime/unethical conduct of the individuals involved.

Our market intelligence team can help in gathering crucial and reliable pieces of intelligence from market sources to enable you to navigate the risks and uncertainties associated with entering a new market, business relationships with business partners and customers. For suspected frauds or compliance violations, we assist in conducting mystery shopping and asset tracing exercises to protect our clients from reputational damage.

Today’s rapidly changing international and regional security threat landscape can metaphor itself into a wide-ranging risk spectrum with serious repercussions on people, assets and brand of the company. Being prepared for any security threat which hampers growth or prevents your organisation from achieving their strategic goals is essential to sustain business over a period of time.

Organisations around the world are in constant endeavour to strengthen their physical security controls, firstly through more effective and efficient governance and, secondly, through robust processes, trained people and state of the art technology.

Our multidisciplinary Strategic Threat Advisory Practice can help you in identifying strategic security risks to your business and assist you in implementing a framework of preventive and detective controls to minimise the risks to an acceptable level. We create a forward looking, scalable and sustainable security implementation roadmap aligned with our client’s business expansion strategy and accordingly design and implement the security framework for mitigation aligned to business goals.

We combine our three core strengths to provide the above value proposition - deep sectoral knowledge and experience, proven consulting and advisory practices and a strong global network.