What Is Asset Tracing and Recovery?
When a company or individual needs to trace and recover assets, appointing a specialist forensic accountant with global experience can help you move quickly and legally.
If you believe that you or your company have been defrauded, you can use civil proceedings to seek to regain what has been wrongly taken. Asset tracing and recovery is the name of the legal process used to find and recover those assets.
It’s a service that is in demand, due to the growth of e-commerce, the increase in domestic and international trade and current economic pressures. However, before launching tracing and recovery investigation, it’s vital you get specialist advice and follow the correct procedures to ensure the safe recovery of your asset.
Why Asset Recovery is Important
There are many reasons why you or your business might need to recover assets. Perhaps a supplier owes you money or has gone into insolvency, there’s been a corporate theft or fraud, or you’re seeking a fair appraisal of a partner’s assets in a divorce. In these cases and more, forensic accountants can help you trace and recover assets that are rightfully yours as part of a financial investigation.
Before you can recover assets, first you must locate them. Assets may have been spent, sold, placed in another person’s name or moved across borders. Traceable assets are wide-ranging and can include real estate and other businesses, moveable possessions such as cars, yachts and airplanes, as well as financial resources such as stocks and shares, undeclared bank accounts and cash.
Tracing these assets is highly specialist work, that requires legal and financial experts to untangle the web of transactions to trace their origin and final destination. It’s complicated, time-consuming and potentially expensive. While it can be tempting for companies or individuals to cut corners and attempt to trace assets themselves, this is extremely risky as you need to act in a legally compliant way. In the case of assets moving across borders, it can be a tightrope walk dealing with the various countries’ legal systems. We have an experienced network of global lawyers to ensure all the necessary and legally-sufficient steps are taken to identify, freeze and recover misappropriated assets wherever they end up.
Asset Tracking: Risk vs. Recovery
It’s important, too, not to underestimate the sophistication of the methods that can be used to disguise or disseminate assets. Before you start any asset tracing or recovery, it’s vital you understand the benefits and potential risk versus reward. Again, this is why independent, third-party advice is crucial.
As a boutique firm, Perun Consultants is ideally placed to provide high-quality consulting services at fair cost. We have extensive experience in forensic accounting, and have a highly-skilled team of accountants, auditors, certified fraud examiners and anti-money laundering specialists. Please get in touch if you would like to find out more about our asset tracing and recovery services.