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Case Studies
(All true examples)

Case 1 - Murder

(Our MD was a former career detective from Scotland Yard. He spent three years on the Central London Murder Squad. This was a case he worked on, which brought home the need for PES.)

Mr X was a middle manager at a large central London firm of surveyors and estate agents that we will call Company A. He left work one summer's evening to collect his car from the underground car park. As he walked down the slope, someone came up to him, put a gun to his temple, and shot him dead. The area was an expensive one with many high profile residents, foreign businessmen, diplomats, etc. The theories for the murder were many and varied. The 50-man squad of detectives systematically eliminated them all, except one. The team looking at Mr X's working life discovered he had recently given an adverse annual appraisal to one of his junior surveyors (Mr Y). They drew his personnel file and went through it with a fine toothed comb. It was not difficult. The firm did not have a proper PES programme. Detectives visited his previous employer (Company B), who told of Mr Y's behaviour, threats to kill staff, possession of firearms, erratic behaviour. He wondered why no-one had ever asked for a reference. The answer was that Company A did not think PES was a worthwhile exercise … and one member of staff paid with his life.

Case 2 - Financial Services Industry

Did you know that Nick Leeson of Barings Bank notoriety was never screened properly? A basic check would have revealed "Red Flags" that suggested they should never have employed him. That lapse in PES resulted in a loss of £750 million, the largest ever fraud for its time. The bank basically collapsed. Staff lost their jobs. Reputations were destroyed.

Case 3 - Screening Too Late

One of our clients, a large US corporation and household name with manufacturing plants in the UK, was persuaded to carry out retrospective PES checks when we started working together. Mr Z had been taken on as a computer programmer. It turned out that his reference from his past employer was fraudulent. When he applied for a job with our client, he intercepted the reference letter and replied on headed notepaper in glowing terms. He even scanned in his boss's signature to authenticate the letter. HR sensibly forwarded the case to Corporate Security before taking any action. Their investigation discovered he was downloading proprietary information and intellectual property to South Africa … and all because HR did not have a proper PES programme in place.

Did you know … that over the past ten years or so, research in both the UK and US has repeatedly shown that 70% of job applications contain some form of 'material falsehood'?

There are many more examples of how PES has helped business in the prevention of operational risk.

Our formula of V2 + IR = +PES would have prevented each of the above cases.