The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners has published an ACFE Insights post titled „Key Findings from The Impact of Fraud at U.S. Public Companies Benchmarking Report“, written by Rihonna Scoggins. The article distills headline results from a new benchmarking study of U.S. listed companies and frames what boards, audit committees and internal auditors should do next. It is a compact entry that previews the data and points readers to the full report, while underlining the need for better detection and stronger governance practices.
The scale of the problem comes through in two numbers that will focus any boardroom conversation. Respondents tied to U.S. public companies reported that known fraud consumed 1.06 percent of revenue in 2024, and the typical public company is estimated to lose about 2.5 percent of revenues each year to fraud, detected or not. These figures make fraud a material earnings and valuation issue rather than a narrow compliance concern, and they set a baseline against which management and assurance functions can measure progress.
Scoggins emphasizes that the work is a joint effort between the ACFE and the Anti Fraud Collaboration, which connects audit committees, financial reporting leaders and practitioners around shared fraud risks. That collaboration matters because it encourages a common vocabulary for risk assessment, controls and disclosures, which in turn makes benchmarking more than a marketing exercise. The article positions the report as a reference point for leaders who want to understand how their exposure and control posture compares to peers and where investments are likely to yield the largest benefit.
One lever stands out across the findings. More and better proactive and continuous monitoring is seen by a majority of respondents as a way to deter and detect fraud earlier. The article cites the figure of 56 percent in support of that view, which aligns with the practical shift many internal audit functions are already making toward continuous controls testing and telemetry driven analytics. The implication is that companies should validate data pipelines, clarify ownership for exception handling and integrate monitoring outputs into both management action and audit planning.
For corporate governance and internal audit the message is to anchor antifraud programs in measurable outcomes. Audit committees can ask management to translate the headline percentages into company specific loss estimates and to connect those estimates to the control environment, incident response and speak up mechanisms. Internal audit can map where continuous monitoring already exists, identify blind spots in third party relationships and high velocity processes, and ensure that insights from monitoring feed the risk-based audit plan. The ACFE article presents benchmarking as a starting point that helps organizations prioritize scarce resources and demonstrate accountability to investors.
This post comments on Rihonna Scoggins’s ACFE Insights article, “Key Findings from The Impact of Fraud at U.S. Public Companies Benchmarking Report”, published in August 2025 here.