A survey of nearly 900 international companies found they lost an average of $8.2m to fraud during the past three years, with 85 per cent of them reporting at least one serious incident in the period.

The average loss was up 22 per cent from a similar survey last year also done by the Economist Intelligence Unit for Kroll, an international security firm. The results suggest that efforts to increase compliance and monitoring have so far not succeeded in cutting down on problems ranging from theft of physical assets and information to bid-rigging and procurement fraud.