Electronic Imaging: Avoiding a Paper Avalanche when Managing Complex Cases

Electronic imaging technology provides organizations with the tools required to quickly categorize, filter, customize, analyze, store, and retrieve enormous amounts of information residing on multiple media. Imaging has become part of the senior management agenda to increase productivity while controlling the high cost of information management. Likewise, in the investigative arena, the future of managing complex fraud cases lies increasingly in the effective use of electronic imaging.

Electronic imaging, as it relates to fraud examinations, is the process of scanning evidential or case-related documents into a magnetic medium, such as a computer’s hard drive, or an optical disk, such as a CD-ROM. Fraud examiners then can retrieve, sort, and analyze their documents without the hassle of manually sifting through massive amounts of paper files.

Fraud examiners and prosecutors may have legal obligations to complete cases in a reasonable time and make full disclosure of all materials collected. Cases have been rejected because of the length of time taken to bring them to prosecution.

Complying with these requirements manually can involve extensive photocopying costs and the resulting limitations may adversely impact some aspects of case management, such as limiting the scope of the investigation.