Do one or two of your employees have very close relationships with vendors? Do any key employees have outside business interests that might conflict with their job duties? Do any appear to dominate the company? Does the company have financial goals that are unrealistic? If the answer is yes to any of these, your business could be vulnerable to fraud, says Association of Certified Fraud Examiners founder Joseph Wells in his piece for the Journal of Accountancy.

Wells offers some good tips for controlling the risk. Like implementing policies for receipt of gifts, discounts and services offered by a supplier or customer, ensuring that employees with access to proprietary information sign nondisclosure agreements, implementing policies and procedures addressing the identification, classification and handling of proprietary information, conducting pre-employment background checks to identify previous dishonest or unethical behavior, running ethics and anti-fraud training programs, providing hotlines, rotating who handle cash receipts and accounting duties, checking refunds, voids and discounts to identify patterns and inconsistencies, periodically reviewing the payroll to identify duplicate or missing social security numbers, and implementing policies policies and procedures for addressing the identification, classification and handling of proprietary information.

It's a good start. One suspects not many companies have all of these in place. Particularly the smaller ones.