Know Your Employee (KYE) is the perfect solution for a thorough and efficient screening of applicants and employees

Systematic media monitoring prevents risky business connections

From Claudio Foglini
Senior Sales Consultant, Intelligence & Compliance Management, Scalaris AG

Trust is good, caution is better! Those in charge of personnel have long since given up their dependence on the first good impression and their gut feeling. They are aiming to support decisions with facts. However, their options are often very limited, because the required tools for acquiring information are missing. The manual collection of data is not only extremely time and cost consuming. A lot of relevant sources and current reports remain hidden and thus, we usually only know half of the truth.

KYE observes all relevant public information sources and provides facts worth knowing in an automatic and ad hoc manner. In addition to this, Scalaris works together with worldwide information and news providers, such as Thomson-Reuters/ProQuest, Dow Jones and World-Check. The market leading search technology from Autonomy is another guarantee for the quality of the solution.

Whether customer, vendor, partner or employee – the danger of being involved in a business crime through business relationships is high. Financial service providers are obligated by law to do comprehensive research about potential customers, so called KYC processes (Know Your Customer). The screening of employees (Know Your Employee – KYE) is still a sensitive issue in contrast. However, these concerns are unfounded with the correct approach. KYE is based exclusively on public information and news that are available to the public in full. Systematic analyses of this Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) serve in uncovering the black sheep within an organization. It stops people from using their position, knowledge of structures and procedures or access to internal information repositories for getting money and other valuables for their own profit or for criminal activities. Searches show that hardly any company escapes fraud from their own employees. In the USA, companies apparently sustain losses amounting to an average of six percent of their sales. Theft and much more serious, the involvement in corruption or terrorism, however, do not cause only financial damage. The reputation andexistence of a company are on the line.

For personnel agencies, for example, false recommendations have led to direct and hard consequences. Customers go away and the good reputation of the service provider is in danger. Airlines, public defense or research facilities have an even higher amount of social responsibility. They are not allowed to hire «dubious» people and people that are connected with dubious groups as pilots or scientific employees.

Low relevance of «Google» results

Personnel decisions can have dramatic consequences and it is worth making each individual decision with absolute care. Sympathy, a conclusive resume and convincing references are not at all evidence of the reliability of an individual. Additionally, people change their motives and behavior while belonging to a company. Know Your Employee (KYE) means the applicant or the employee can always be evaluated based on the most current information available. Many companies are trying to do this today – even if in terms of their very limited options. Those responsible do research before the interview with Google and other search machines. This data from the World Wide Web is directly controlled from those affected, can be old and also simply wrong. They do not deliver reliable and comprehensive decision aids. Another problem is the missing anonymity: Provided with Google statistics, applicants can also relatively easily trace who is being informed about whom and when.

Central OSINT sources

Research in the internet is also very one-sided. Only about 30 percent of information available to the public can be found here. The rest of the Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) comes from printed media, TV and radio, events, surveys, discussions and a lot more. Maybe Mr. X from Brazil recently still had an absolutely clean record. But today, they reported in the local news about suspicions that he might be involved in criminal schemes. If and when this announcement can be found in the internet cannot be said with certainty. Those who are doing business with Mr. X, however, need this information immediately.

In this connection, private information and news vendors like Thomson-Reuters/ProQuest, Dow Jones and World-Check play a central role. They are in the position to capture and evaluate daily notifications without the least dealy. The integration of these databases is indispensible for «bullet-proof» Know Your Employee (KYE) processes.

Systematic, immediate and anonymous KYE

Companies are currently fighting with a massive overflow of information. The possibilities to prepare decisions and to remain up-to-date are nearly unlimited. And that makes the entire database unusable for them. With Intelligence Automation Solutions (IAS), such as KYE, Scalaris brings order to this chaos. The solution integrates all OSINT sources as well as data from multiple other repositories. This allows the user to access all information through a central KYE platform: The user just enters a single search query for an employee and the KYE system starts the search of all connected repositories – according to demand, either once or continually. All relevant content is filtered and provided automatically within seconds.

However, the preservation of absolute anonymity is a key factor in this context. With KYE, companies cannot only «hide» their search within Google. Through the concealment of data inquiries, the system also guarantees absolute confidentiality of the inspected names from the database providers. Additionally, KYE fulfills all requirements for global usage through its sophisticated name-match-system that recognizes countless phonetic, cultural and geographic variations, languages, foreign alphabets, different syntaxes and name synonyms.