The ACFE's Report to the Nations is the largest recurring study of occupational fraud. Its long-running findings are remarkably stable: organizations lose an estimated five percent of revenue to fraud in a typical year, tips uncover more schemes than any other method, and weak internal controls are the most common enabler.
The SME lesson is unfashionable but cheap: segregate duties around payments even in a five-person finance team, keep bank authorizations current, and reconcile monthly so anomalies surface in weeks rather than years. A reporting culture where staff can flag concerns beats expensive detection tooling in the data every single edition.