Certified Fraud Examiner Practice Exam 2026 – All-in-One Guide to Master Your Certification!

The type of scheme that involves improperly changing payroll information is known as payroll fraud. This type of fraud typically occurs when an employee or a group of employees manipulate payroll records to create fictitious employees, alter hours worked, or inflate pay rates. This can result in unauthorized payments getting issued, ultimately leading to significant financial losses for the organization.

In the context of payroll fraud, individuals may take advantage of their access to payroll systems to make these unauthorized changes without being detected immediately. They might create ghost employees who do not actually work for the company but still receive paycheck distributions or may modify their own paychecks to reflect a higher salary unjustly.

On the other hand, billing fraud typically pertains to false invoices or services that were never rendered, which falls outside payroll manipulations. Register disbursement involves improper handling of cash from registers rather than payroll alterations, and expense reimbursement schemes revolve around employees submitting fraudulent claims for expenses that weren’t incurred or inflating legitimate expenses. Thus, payroll fraud distinctly focuses on the manipulation of payroll information itself, making it the correct answer to this question.