Fighting fraud the old fashioned way

By Romesh Abeywickrema

The norm is that the law enforcement apparatus of the state should be a step ahead of the most sophisticated white-collar criminal for effective law enforcement.

Crime along with humanity constantly evolves and it goes without saying, so must the techniques and indeed the technology to fight crime, especially in this day and age when white collar crime is increasingly going hi-tech, and technology put to the wrong use is helping criminals get away.
In Sri Lanka the law enforcement agency tasked with fighting white-collar crime is the Fraud Investigation Bureau, the headquarters of which is located at Wellawatte.

One look at the building gives a fair indication as to what to expect inside. Today when even the corner shop will give you a computer generated print out for the kilo of rice you purchase, the resources made available to this important law enforcement arm is appalling to say the least.

When we visited the Fraud Investigation Bureau last week the first thought that came to mind on seeing the sight that greeted us was what a field day white-collar criminals must be having. Of course since looks can be deceptive we were hoping against hope that indeed would be the case but with each floor that we visited – three floors in all – a huge chunk of that optimism diminished.

From the dilapidated desk that serves as the reception to ‘Unit 7’ on the top floor it is one apology for a fraud investigation bureau after another. The reception itself is an indicator of the level of efficiency and professionalism of this key law enforcement agency. Here each visitor is verbally asked for his/her National Identity Card number but those manning the desk never once bothered during our period of observation to actually check the IDs. Anyone could rattle off any bogus number, get a visitor pass and be free to roam around inside.

Concern about what this could entail were made real when our internal alarm bells began to ring when the file, which we were seeking, could not be located because “the book was not there.”

After some serious searching by an officer who rather surprisingly seemed to be interested in our request it was found that the ‘book’ had been taken to court for a case that was being heard that day. This means that due to some misfortune if the ‘book’ is lost or misplaced hundreds of cases will simply disappear from the records of the Fraud Bureau, as it does not have any sort of back up records. Unbelievable, but true.

An interesting episode that we observed was a spirited conversation between a complainant and an investigating officer.

The complainant walked up to the officer handling his complaint and asked if there was any progress on his complaint. The officer after laboriously turning file after file and going through some papers told the complainant that there was nothing new on the matter. This made the complainant smile. Intrigued the officer asked the man what was so funny and the reply came fast enough, ‘I knew what you were going to say.’ Apparently the complainant had made many similar visits and got the same answer after the same file searching rigmarole by the same officer but the officer could not remember the complainant!

As if to make amends the officer then began a mini lecture that the main reason progress could not be made on many cases was because the complaining party did not liaise with the investigating officers often enough! This had the man smiling even more.

What this encounter highlighted was that this vital department was not only bereft of the required equipment such as a computer to store data but that even the quality of the human resources available left much to be desired. So what is the message such a crime-fighting unit sends to potential criminals?
There is little wonder that the prosecution rate of the Sri Lanka Police in the last few years is a pathetic 4% of the total cases recorded.

According to a source at the bureau there was an urgent need to computerise operations as it was near impossible to probe high tech crimes such as credit card fraud, electronic data related crimes, software copyright infringements etc. by officers who were clueless about IT or for that matter electronic commerce and was a sure way of opening the flood gates for such crimes.

With millions being busted on ‘computerisation projects’ at various government departments it is unfathomable that the bureau that is supposed to investigate crimes committed probably using the same computers has itself not seen the colour of a computer.