Page 326 - Deception at work all chapters EBook

Other Applications 379

• they are not required to provide assistance and, on the contrary, may have a legal obligation
of confidentiality to the suspects.

Since these days everything must have a title and an acronym, the process described below is
called ‘cognitive interviewing for fraud’ (CIFF) and its objectives are to get accurate evidence
from witnesses in the business world.

CI is about enhancing recall.
CIFF recognizes other recall problems besides memory failure

THE CIFF METHOD
Overview

CIFF can be viewed in a number of stages. As always, the most important are getting the back-
ground and effective planning.

Inexperienced interviewers are too casual with witness interviews

Doing the background

The fraud theory and investigation plan (see pages 138–140 [xref]) will usually result in the
identification of people who are not themselves under suspicion, but who might be added to
a list of potential witnesses in the categories shown in Table 9.7.

You should obtain as much background information as possible on all potential witnesses
(see Appendix 1) and think about the evidence they might be able to give on the ‘worst case’,
bearing in mind the factors in Table 9.6. You should also fully understand the case and its ‘key
points’, having summaries and exhibits available to show to the witness at the appropriate
time. If the witness has made previous statements on the matter, or other witnesses have, you
should analyse these in a way that makes it easy to highlight the essential facts and discrep-
ancies.

If you believe, for any of the reasons set out in Table 9.7, that the witness might be unwill-
ing to assist, you should plan and rehearse persuasive arguments for delivery in the interview.
The persuasion may be along the lines shown in Table 9.8.

Sometimes it may not be clear whether the person should be treated as a witness or a sus-
pect. For example, you may have specific concerns or even an intuition that he is less than
innocent. In such cases, you should interview him as a suspect using the techniques described
in Chapters 6 and 7.

Unless you are absolutely sure that the witness is innocent, interview him as a suspect

You should consider the timing, sequence and location of interviews very carefully and
unless you are absolutely sure28 that a witness will not alert the suspect he should not be seen
until after the first step (see page 168).

28 Unless such an alert is part of the investigation plan to panic the suspects into action