Payroll-Identity Fraud Diagnostic Director

The mandate

Country payrolls grew through acquisition and local outsourcing, leaving worker identity, attendance, bank instruction and termination evidence in systems that rarely agree. A hotline allegation identified wages continuing after one plant exit, while preliminary analytics found shared bank accounts, recycled national identifiers and unusually frequent manual adjustments. Those signals could reflect legitimate family banking, provider conversion or fraud; the present control set cannot distinguish them. Leadership needs a defensible diagnostic before accusing employees, recovering cash or centralising payroll.

The deliverables are a fraud-hypothesis map, cross-system identity graph, provider-control assessment, sampled case files, quantified exposure range, investigation referral protocol and future assurance design. Testing must connect authorised positions, worker records, physical or digital attendance, manager relationships, tax and benefit registrations, bank destinations, changes, pay results, terminations and provider disbursement. The work must separate control weakness, data quality, policy exception, collusion indicator and substantiated loss rather than presenting every anomaly as wrongdoing.

Four milestones govern the engagement: week three accepts the risk hypotheses, data perimeter and privacy protocol; week seven completes population analytics and sample selection; week twelve accepts evidence packs and referral decisions for material clusters; and week seventeen delivers exposure, root causes, provider remedies and the redesigned assurance plan. Billing follows those four milestones, and cases requiring privileged investigation will move to appointed counsel without contaminating ordinary diagnostic files.

Acceptance requires payroll, finance and security owners to reproduce sampled payments from position approval through bank settlement; every reported loss range must identify evidence strength and false-positive sensitivity; and country counsel must approve the proposed handling of worker and banking data. The steering group will provide one consolidated response within seven working days per milestone, with contested cases recorded as unresolved rather than forced into a numeric conclusion.

The client provides worker and position records, payroll results, attendance, bank-account tokens, change logs, termination evidence, provider files, hotline allegations, policies, contracts, counsel guidance and secure analytical access. The consultant does not interview suspected individuals, determine misconduct, freeze pay, contact banks, recover funds, make disciplinary recommendations, access unnecessary personal content or issue legal and forensic opinions reserved to appointed specialists.

Why this is external work

Payroll teams know country exceptions, finance sees payments and security sees allegations, but each controls evidence that may implicate its own process or provider. An internal analytics exercise would also struggle to separate fraud signals from conversion noise without consistent challenge. External payroll-fraud expertise can create referral-ready evidence and redesign assurance without presuming guilt or selling a replacement platform.

What you will own

• Frame fraud hypotheses across fictitious workers, duplicate identities, diverted bank details, post-termination pay, collusive adjustments and provider disbursement.
• Build a privacy-controlled identity graph connecting position, worker, attendance, manager, tax, benefit, bank and payment evidence.
• Design anomaly thresholds that account for legitimate shared accounts, rehires, expatriates, provider migration and statutory corrections.
• Assemble sampled case files with provenance, alternative explanations, quantified payments, evidence gaps and investigation referral triggers.
• Assess provider controls over worker setup, bank changes, payroll approval, file transmission, disbursement, exceptions and reconciliation.
• Quantify exposure ranges and recovery feasibility without converting untested anomalies into reported fraud losses.
• Deliver the future assurance model, accountable controls, monitoring scenarios, provider remedies and protected case-handoff protocol.

Candidate qualifications

• Has led payroll-fraud, ghost-worker or employee-payment diagnostics across multiple countries, providers and worker populations.
• Understands payroll master data, time capture, banking instructions, statutory registration, disbursement files and reconciliation evidence.
• Can build identity and payment analytics while preserving privacy, privilege, proportional access and false-positive discipline.
• Has distinguished provider conversion errors, policy exceptions and legitimate shared accounts from collusive or fictitious-worker patterns.
• Brings credible collaboration with employee relations, internal audit, security, counsel and country payroll owners.
• Produces investigation-ready evidence without conducting unauthorised surveillance or presenting suspicion as established misconduct.

Non-negotiables

• Can attend monthly Mexico City evidence rooms and conduct targeted provider and plant interviews despite remote delivery.
• Brings direct payroll identity-fraud work; general HR analytics or accounts-payable fraud experience alone is insufficient.
• Will not name suspected employees in broad reports, exceed approved data scope or imply guilt from anomaly scores.
• Will disclose relationships with payroll providers, banks, forensic firms, labour counsel and proposed technology vendors.

1. 49 words maximum. Which payroll signal would you test before treating a shared bank account as fraud?
2. 49 words maximum. How would you preserve privilege when an anomaly becomes a potential misconduct case?
3. 49 words maximum. What evidence is required before an estimated payroll exposure is reported as a loss?