Tag Archive for 'Canada'

How to Become a Professional Private Investigator II

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on November 19, 2008
in How to Become a Professional Private Investigator
. 0 Comments

In my first article on this topic, I complained that Canadian community colleges don’t properly prepare students to be good entry level Private Investigators. The problem facing students from these programmes is not unique to this field, but it seems magnified in this industry.

What the Colleges Don’t Teach

As in any human endeavor, the devil is in the details. The colleges do a fair job of teaching some useful skills, but they don’t teach about the industry. The colleges teach the skills associated with doing certain tasks within this industry. They don’t teach the skills associated with being successful in this industry.  The two skill sets have very little in common.

This series of articles is about how to come to grips with what they don’t teach in college and how to combine the task knowledge with the business knowledge in the right mix to be successful. Let’s start with definitions that  provide instruction on how one must proceed.

The Autodidact Private Investigator

Autodidact (au·to·di·dact , ȯ-tō-ˈdī-ˌdakt, noun) is a person who has learned a subject without the benefit of a teacher or formal education; a self-taught person.

A private investigator, is a person who can be hired by individuals or groups to undertake investigations.

The details that you must absorb in order to be successful are many. The sum of these details define your level of professionalism. No school will teach you these details. You must learn them through experimentation, experience, and self-directed study.

Self-directed Study

Gaining the task and business knowledge should be approached as a series of projects. Choose a topic, acquire an overview of the topic, then investigate the specific aspects of the topic that are most useful to you.  Following this pattern you can acquire a great deal of useful knowledge in a relatively short period of time. If you can’t do this, then you will not be a successful Private Investigator.

I will deal with a separate subject area in each of the following articles within this series of articles.

How to Become a Professional Private Investigator I

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on November 17, 2008
in Canada, How to Become a Professional Private Investigator, Methods and Private Investigator
. 0 Comments

Lately, I have noticed that I have become a mentor to several young Private Investigators. The hardest part of this role is conveying that being a good Investigator entails more than secret sources and interrogation techniques.

Where do Private Investigators Come From?

Many people become Private Investigators without a college education, experience, or a clear plan for their new career.  They don’t get any meaningful training from their employers. Often, the employer just wants a warm body to do the work and views them as disposable if they don’t measure-up to some arbitrary standard.

At best, the Private Investigator took a Law Enforcement Administration course or Investigation course at a Canadian community college. These new Investigators usually have unrealistic expectations of remuneration and working conditions. At worst, the new Investigator couldn’t cut it as a pizza delivery driver.

The problem most entry level Investigators face is gaining an understanding of the skills and knowledge that they must progressively acquire to have a profitable career. Few employers or colleges provide this information to illustrate what a progressive career would look like. Fewer still, provide training and career guidance.

I recently spoke to a college instructor of investigation related courses who dismissed this lack of career guidance, saying that it was the employee’s own fault for not understanding the industry and that the employer just had to take what was on offer in the labour market for Investigators. Of course, he had never been a Private Investigator or agency owner. Nevertheless, the callousness and sheer stupidity of his remarks forced me to revisit the topic of training the new Private Investigator.

Now that I have climbed onto this soapbox, a series of articles on this topic will follow.  The next article will outline what the community college programs don’t teach. Then I will move on to how to learn to be a Professional Private Investigator in Canada.

Copyright as an Asset - Canada

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on October 6, 2008
in Canada, Due Diligence, Intellectual Property Rights and Sources
. 0 Comments

In Canada, one does not have to register your copyright to have protection, but when you register with the Copyright Office, you receive a certificate which can be used to your advantage in the event that your work is infringed. Formal registration of a work is not required. An author or the author’s employer usually enjoys copyright protection automatically on creation of the work.

Registration of a copyright is done by completing an application and sending it to the Copyright Office. A copy of the work is not sent along with application. Under the Library and Archives of Canada Act, two copies of every book published in Canada, and one copy of every sound recording manufactured in Canada that has some Canadian content must be sent to the National Library and Archives within one week of publication.

Library and Archives Canada
Legal Deposit
395 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON  K1A 0N4
Tel.: 819-997-9565
Fax: 819-953-8508

When a publication is deposited, a brief description is entered in AMICUS, Library and Archives Canada’s database. They are also catalogued and listed in Canadiana, the national bibliography, which began in 1950 and is widely circulated in Canada.

Canadian MP Voting Records

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on September 22, 2008
in Canada and Legislation
. 0 Comments

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to locate the voting records of Members of Parliament who are now candidates in this election. Do this to become better informed Canadian.

The House of Commons’ Compendium of Procedure article on Recorded Votes (also called divisions) is your first stop. Your second stop is the chapter on Debate and Voting which explains when members’ names are recorded during a vote. This also explains when members’ names are not recorded.

Your next stop should be How’d They Vote. This site takes takes the Hansard from the parliament website, and extracts information on bills, members of parliament, votes, and speeches.

LegisInfo lets you peruse votes on bills along with the following:

  • the text of the bill at various stages;
  • government press releases and backgrounders (for government bills);
  • legislative summaries from the Parliamentary Information and Research Service;
  • important speeches at second reading;
  • coming into force data.

For example, choose Bill C2 in the current session under House of Commons, Government Bills. Once you have selected the bill, you may select Selected Recorded Votes and see how the members voted.

Finding Bank Accounts and Storage Lockers

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on September 5, 2008
in Canada, Methods, Private Investigator, Search Engines and Search Strategies
. 0 Comments

First, make a list of all addresses linked to the subject, including the Canadian postal code. Then search in Google for bank or storage plus the postal code. Do not include a hyphen or put the postal code in quotations. Search each postal code in order. Now you have a list of banks where the subject may have an account and a list of sites where he may have a storage locker.

Tort of Negligent Investigation

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on July 29, 2008
in Canada, Courts and Private Investigator
. 0 Comments

Last year I wrote about the Tort for Negligent Investigations  and how this would reach out and touch a Private Investigation firm in Canada soon.

Private Investigator Sued

The Ontario Court of Appeal has expanded the tort of negligent investigation to allow employees to sue private investigators hired by employers to probe suspected wrongdoing in the workplace. The unanimous ruling by Associate Chief Justice Dennis O’Connor and Justices Marc Rosenberg and Kathryn Feldman extends the newly created tort of negligent investigation to private investigators. This tort was first recognized by the Supreme Court in 2007 as applicable to police.

In Correia v. Canac Kitchens, 2008 ONCA 506 & [2008] O.J. No. 2497, the court has imposed a new duty of care regarding investigators. The plaintiff was an innocent employee mistakenly fired and arrested for theft following a private investigation launched by his employer. His name was confused with that of another employee with a similar name.  The sequence of events that led to erroneous identification of Mr. Correia is summarized in the chronology in paragraph [8].

Every Private Investigator in Canada should pay close attention to this case and the circumstances that gave rise to it.

Finding the Franchise Owner

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on July 16, 2008
in Canada, Company Research and Competitive Intelligence
. 0 Comments

Franchises identify themselves in the marketplace by using a common name and trademark. Each user of the name purchases a franchise which allows the franchisee the right to use the name. This is where the fun begins.

The franchisee will be a company or partnership with rights to use the name. In Canada, the right to use the name will normally be filed as a Business Name Registration. This allows a person, company, or partnership to operate under a name other than his or its proper name.

Now imagine you have a franchise at 123 Main Street in some Ontario town or city. How do you distinguish it from all the other franchises using the same business name?

In Ontario, OnCorp will allow you to view a list of all the business name registrations along with the recorded addresses.

A mouse click in the check-box next to the registration with the correct address will get you the Business Name Registration, and that will tell you the name of the company or partnership that owns that franchise location.

Subjects with Multiple SSN’s

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on July 9, 2008
in Identity Fraud, Identity Theft and Private Investigator
. 0 Comments

In Canada, it is rare to find somebody with two Social Insurance Numbers (SIN).  Where this happens it may be a case of clerical error or a reference to a former SIN appropriated by an identity thief. The former reason is extremely rare. In thirty years I have only encountered this once. The Canadian SIN is used as an identifier less than the SSN is in the USA.

However, in the USA the case is somewhat different. According to Susan Daniels, of Daniels and Associates Investigations, Inc. in Chardon Ohio, when searching through database aggregators such as IRB, it is common to find a subject referenced with two or three Social Security Numbers (SSN). Here are some of the reasons a person may show-up with multiple SSN’s:

  • a wife’s or child’s SSN could end up with father’s name
  • a parent’s SSN could show up with a child
  • the subject bought something with someone else and the SSNs could end up with each other’s name
  • the database producer is relating several SSN’s to one address
  • an error by whoever entered the data

Susan Daniels of Daniels and Associates Investigations, Inc. (9754 Thwing Road Chardon, OH 44024, Tel.:440.286.4072) has been a Private Investigator for 15 years.

Identity-theft Protection for Canadians

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on July 1, 2008
in Canada, Identity Fraud and Identity Theft
. 0 Comments

You don’t have to spend $100 to $200 a year to defend yourself from identity theft at the level of protection that a paid service offers. You can do almost everything the services do, for free.

DIY Identity-theft Protection: A 12-step Program

Investment Dealers Association Replaced

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on June 17, 2008
in Canada and Company Research
. 0 Comments

The Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada (IIROC), a self-regulatory body, replaces both the 90 year old Investment Dealers Association and Market Regulations Services Inc. as the single overseer of the integrity of debt and equity trading in Canada.

The Investment Dealers Association the IDA had regulated member firms in the brokerage business as well as fixed-income trading and Market Regulations Services Inc. conducted market surveillance.

Canadian Federal Government Databases & Publications

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on June 5, 2008
in Canada
. 0 Comments

A web document entitled lists the Canadian federal government databases accessible through the Internet in 2008.

The Government of Canada Publications Web site allows you to locate and/or order free and priced publications authored by Government of Canada departments. These publications encompass both traditional printed documents and publications in alternative formats and electronic products. The catalog contains over 100,000 titles.

Inter-Corporate Onwership Searching III

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on May 30, 2008
in Canada, Company Research, Competitive Intelligence and Due Diligence
. 0 Comments

The Inter-Corporate Ownership data produced by Statistics Canada contains information on the structures of Canadian enterprises. It provides the names of all holding and held companies (both domestic and foreign) in Canada and their respective ownership percentages.

The information is collected by Statistics Canada under the Corporations and Labour Unions Returns Act (CALURA) and is supplemented with information from international publications. In 1998 the act was amended to remove the labour unions component (Part II), leaving Part I of the Act unchanged. The revised Act, named the Corporations Returns Act, is equivalent to CALURA part I.

All the reporting companies must have gross revenues of at least 15 million dollars or assets exceeding 10 million dollars.

The updated data is reported quarterly. This data is the most accurate, timely, and complete data on inter-corporate ownership in Canada. It also provides detailed information of multi-national enterprises that have some component in Canada.


Inter-Corporate Ownership Searching II

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on May 23, 2008
in Canada, Company Research, Competitive Intelligence, Due Diligence and U.S.A.
. 0 Comments

Corporate Affiliations

The Corporate Affiliations database appears on LexisNexis and Dialog. It can also be purchased as directories and on CD. According to the Dialog Bluesheet, it covers about 184,000 U.S. and non-U.S. companies. This includes private and public companies, both parents and their subsidiaries and major divisions. All major U.S. domestic and international stock exchange listed companies are included. U.S. privately held companies must have reported annual sales in excess of $10 million and foreign privately held companies must have reported annual sales in excess of $50 million to be included in the database. Each record includes the executive names, director names, corporate family hierarchy. Net worth, total assets, and total liabilities sometimes appear in the record.

I have never found this resource particularly useful because it has a high threshold for inclusion of companies. It is also US-centric. It shines for researching large enterprises with a large component in the U.S.A..

Inter-Corporate Ownership Searching I

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on May 20, 2008
in Canada, Company Research, Competitive Intelligence and Due Diligence
. 0 Comments

Finding how your subject company fits into a large enterprise structure may turn into an avocation with some companies, but I’ll tell you how to get started.

Begin by understanding the terminology, then in the case of Canada, realize that you will have difficulty recognising interlocking boards as you may not search corporate filings by director name. This leaves you with the immediate subject company as your starting point.

Typically, I start with Dun & Bradstreet Canadian Market Identifiers (DMI). The advantages of the DMI databases (there are several DMI databases) are the number of companies in the database (over 1.2 million), and no sales or asset threshold for inclusion in the database.

The most useful fields in this database are the Dun’s Numbers for the company and its Parent and Ultimate Domestic Parent. This identifies three levels of the overall enterprise to explore in one record. You will have the information on the subject company, and further searches will identify its immediate parent and the ultimate domestic parent.

I then search the D&B Who Owns Whom database for the Ultimate Domestic Parent to identify the foreign parent if one exists. If I find an Ultimate Global Parent, then I determine what my record cost will be by listing the companies in the family tree. Usually, I end up paying the lowest amount as there will be 25 or fewer companies in the family tree. I have never had to pay the full record cost because I have never come across an enterprise family with over 200 member companies.

Uncovering a Person’s Corporate Affiliations

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on April 30, 2008
in Canada, Company Research, Competitive Intelligence, Methods, Private Investigator and Search Strategies
. 2 Comments

In Canada, only one incorporating jurisdiction allows a search by officer or director name. Uncovering a person’s corporate affiliations in Canada is difficult.

The Investigator must embark upon an involved search strategy using a variety of database aggregators, the Internet, and a few public record sources. After conducting all these searches, the Investigator will never be certain that he has found everything.

Doing this type of research is dependent upon the Investigator’s understanding of the sources’ content and how to connect the data to the objectives of the investigation.

The Investigator must know how to search directory databases, commercial credit reports, news and journal databases, insider filings, statistical data, court records, lien filings, and much more to reveal corporate affiliations in Canada.

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