Chris Hattam

HW Fisher Forensic

I am part of HW Fisher Forensic, having joined the department in 2008.

In my time at the department I have focused on royalty audits and on contract compliance work.  I manage the audit programmes for a number of the department’s clients, from world renowned media companies to major automotive firms.

I’m particularly proud of the customised service I help the team offer to our clients.  A notable example is when we were asked to perform a programme of royalties audits at extremely short notice.  Within a few weeks I had confirmed 25 audits with licensees and deployed a team of 12 specialist royalties auditors to multiple different South East Asian territories so that we could meet the client’s requirements.

I have performed audits on hundreds of companies across the world helping our clients to recover many millions of pounds, while simultaneously helping them build and improve their relationships with important business partners.

A particular highlight was an audit that I performed of a fashion client’s USA distribution partner.  My work determined that there were systemic issues with the company’s reporting of sales and in the allocation of transactions to ledgers.  These errors had not been detected by an earlier royalty audit performed by another firm or by the distributor’s statutory audit.  I prepared a report of my findings and helped the client to amicably settle the audit for several million dollars.  Two years later I re-visited the distributor so that the client could have confidence that the issues that we uncovered had been corrected.