A whistleblower alleged that field-survey work at a South Asian operation of a global market-research firm had been fabricated: some of the research the business sold had, in part, never been done. For a company whose entire product is the integrity of its data, the allegation went to the core of the business.
“Payment records and backup archives from 2000 to 2012 were recovered and rebuilt.”
The investigation, carried out during my tenure at a global investigations firm and instructed through international counsel, turned on reconstruction. Field projects leave an administrative skeleton even when the fieldwork is invented: payment sheets for surveyors, project records, archived backups. The team recovered and rebuilt that skeleton across more than a decade of historic data, payment records and backup archives reaching from 2000 to 2012, and read the fabricated projects against the genuine ones until the pattern separated.
In a data-integrity fraud there is usually no missing money to trace. The question is whether work that was billed was ever performed, and the proof has to come from the internal logic of the records: who was paid, when and for what, and whether the pattern of a real project is present. The work is slow, and because it rests entirely on the company’s own archive, it is hard to challenge.