Sapir's approach is based on the premise that 90 percent of people won't lie directly when asked a question, but instead, will omit information they feel may be detrimental to their interests. By studying speech patterns and analyzing the structure and content in statements written by the subject of an investigation, the scan technique will often uncover lies and half-truths in a matter of hours. Moreover, a scan analysis typically costs much less than a full-blown financial investigation. In fact, one of scan's biggest attractions is its simplicity.
Corporate managers can learn the basic scan skills in a four-day seminar offered by Sapir.
Managers from dozens of US companies have attended the scan course in the past few years, including Ford Motor Company, Exxon Corporation and Whirlpool Corporation. Hughes argues that, since 5 percent of a company's turnover is lost to internal fraud, human resource departments need to be able to eliminate applicants who may be dishonest or have serious character flaws. Richard Batten, currently the director of fraud and investigation for PricewaterhouseCoopers in Australia, uses scan to ferret out suspects in cases of corporate crime. In a recent intellectual property case, a client company asked Batten to investigate the offering for sale of a highly confidential strategic document to a competitor. The company's senior management didn't know whether the document was acquired externally, through competitive intelligence gathering or industrial espionage, or internally.