When you think something is wrong and you need to know before you act

• Margin has fallen and nobody can explain why

  The most common way fraud surfaces in an SME. Revenue looks normal, gross margin drifts down over several quarters, and every individual explanation is plausible. The pattern only appears when somebody tests the transactions rather than reading the summary.

• Someone has left, or is about to

  A departure in accounts payable, procurement, cash handling or sales often precedes a discovery. Sometimes the departure is the discovery. Either way there is a window in which records, devices and access logs are still intact, and it closes quickly.

• Your auditor raised something and moved on

  An audit is not designed to find fraud. When an auditor flags an unexplained difference, an unusual related party balance or a control weakness, they have done their job by noting it. Finding out what actually happened is a separate exercise.

• A shareholder or partner dispute

  Where one party has run the finance function and another wants to understand what has been happening, an independent reconstruction of the numbers is usually the only way the conversation moves forward.

• Something looks wrong in a business you are buying

  Round-number transactions, suppliers with no web presence, margins that do not match the market, inventory that never quite reconciles. Standard due diligence tests whether the numbers are supportable. This tests whether they are real.

• Cash handling at the point of sale

  Retail, food and beverage, clinics and gyms all share the same weak point. Where takings are handled by hand and reconciled loosely, leakage accumulates quietly and is rarely a single dramatic event.

• Scope and preserve, before anything else

  The first conversation is about what you suspect, who must not know, and what evidence exists. Preserving records, system access logs and device data comes before any testing, because the most common way an investigation fails is that somebody was alerted and the trail was tidied.

• Reconstruct the records

  Independent reconstruction from source: bank statements, supplier invoices and statements, purchase orders, delivery notes, payroll, point of sale data and the accounting ledger. The reconstruction is compared against what the books say rather than built from them.

• Test the transactions

  Duplicate payments, suppliers sharing bank details with employees, payments just under an approval threshold, credit notes issued after month end, unusual journal entries at period close, round-sum transactions, dormant suppliers reactivated. Patterns rather than instincts.

• Talk to people, in their own language

  Interviews are conducted in Thai where that is the language people work in. This is not a small point. An interview through an interpreter loses hesitation, phrasing and the thing said in passing, which is often where the answer is.

• Quantify the loss

  A number you can act on, with the basis set out and the assumptions stated. The distinction between what is proven, what is inferred and what is estimated is made explicit, because that distinction is what determines whether the figure survives challenge.

• A report that can be used

  A written report structured so your lawyer, your insurer, your board or the police can work from it. Findings, evidence, method, quantification, and recommendations on the control failures that allowed it. Not a memo of impressions.

• We are not lawyers

  We work alongside your counsel and often at their direction. Decisions about criminal complaints, employment action, civil claims and privilege are legal decisions and we do not make them for you.

• We are not licensed investigators

  We do not conduct surveillance, access private records we are not entitled to, or gather evidence by any means you would not want disclosed in a hearing. Evidence collected improperly is worse than no evidence, because it can compromise the whole case.

• We will tell you if there is nothing there

  A material share of suspected fraud turns out to be a broken process, an incompetent supplier reconciliation or a genuine misunderstanding. That is a good outcome and we report it plainly rather than manufacturing a finding to justify the fee.

• Discretion is the default

  Engagements are conducted so that only the people you nominate know they are happening. Nothing appears on this site, in a case study, or in any conversation, ever.

Two things make this work in Thailand specifically, and most firms have one or neither.

The first is that the people doing it have designed and tested internal controls rather than only read about them. Our Financial Controller's background is internal audit and risk management for a French banking group across APAC, covering exactly the ground where these failures happen: approvals, segregation of duties, supplier onboarding, cash handling.

The second is language. The invoices, the delivery notes, the chat messages and the interviews are in Thai. Anything that reaches you through a translator has already been filtered by someone deciding what mattered, which in an investigation is precisely the wrong place for a judgement call.

Who does the work · Legal support through Narai Partners