What do I do to define the scope of an investigation? Sometimes my clients really do need me to do the scope defining and that’s good and great and fine. And sometimes clients need to hear that there might not be investigative value in some of the things that are being articulated as the complaint. And so it can be helpful for a client if the investigator is able to say things like, “well, we need to include this in our investigation because there’s a federal law about it.” Other times we need to say, “hey, I don’t know if there’s a law or a policy about this, but it sure does seem like it’s costing you a lot of money.” Or “hey, you told me that you’ve investigated this other issue twice, internally. It doesn’t seem like your internal investigation is getting you the information you need to fix the underlying problem. It seems like you should have a third-party investigator look at that.” There’s a legal obligation issue, but there’s also the return on investment issue. And so sometimes clients do need our help in being able to define the scope. How ever it gets done, it needs to get done at the very beginning of the investigative efforts so that we’re not interviewing or spending time reviewing documents unrelated to our scope.
