By Meric C. Bloch, CCEP-F, JD, CFE
Excerpted from Meric’s new book, Investigative Interviewing: It’s Not Just What You Ask, But How You Ask It—A Q&A Guide
What is the difference between an interview and an interrogation?
There are actually two types of interviews (but one of them has a name that seems redundant): investigative interviews and interrogations. You will sometimes use both types with the same interviewee, but most of the time you will use one or the other.
Technically, an investigative interview is a non-accusatory fact-gathering conversation to determine facts, sequences of events, alibis, or to confirm information with a specific interviewee. The questions are generally open-ended, and your interviewee does most of the talking. If close-ended questions are asked, you are usually trying to clearly establish certain facts or to confirm important details.
Your [incident] reporter and the interviewees will receive an investigatory interview. Your objective with those interviewees is to gather relevant information to determine the truth about the allegation. These facts can be gathered usually by open-ended questions seeking narrative answers or close-ended questions to pin down key details.
The subject is generally interviewed last so he can meaningfully respond to the information you’ve gathered. (This is intended to solicit his responses, offer him the procedural fairness of being confronted by the information, and hopefully to persuade him to admit his misconduct.) By the time you’ve reached the subject, the fact-gathering phase should be essentially complete.
An interrogation is not really an inquiry for facts. It is a search for admissions. An admission by the subject—even with spin and mitigating circumstances—is still an admission. The additional information may put the misconduct into context, but it is still misconduct. Your findings are always stronger when you can point to an admission than when you have no choice but to rely on the aggregate weight of the circumstantial information you gathered. (It also gives you the peace of mind that you don’t have to worry about being wrong.)
You obtain admissions by asking discrete close-ended questions which are intended collectively to constitute a confession. A close-ended question that simply asks “did you approve fake invoices to steal money from the company?” will generally receive an answer of “No.”
Discrete questions will accumulate admissions to build to a confession because they progressively paint the subject into a corner. Even if he continues to maintain his innocence, it’s essentially futile. In an interrogation of a subject suspected of approving phony invoices, for example, the discrete questions might proceed this way:
- You approved these invoices, right?
- Your approval means you saw the work performed or confirmed that it had been performed, right?
- Your signature appears on each of these invoices, right?
- This means the company should properly pay each one of these, right?
- But you don’t know any of these consultants, right?
- But you don’t know if the work was actually done, right?
- But you knew your signature was intended to make your colleague rely on what you did so the invoices would be paid, right?
For each of these questions, the answer is either yes or no. The answer is either an admission or you can paint him further into a corner until you get an admission. For example, if he denies that he doesn’t know any of the consultants, ask him to tell you who they are. He probably won’t or can’t tell you.
The interrogation also looks for context and mitigating circumstances. Most subjects are not evil, but are colleagues who made some bad decisions and likely compounded them with additional bad decisions. Learn about what motivated the misconduct so you can determine if any workplace factors—poor management, no perception of detection, a lack of training, etc.—facilitated it.
So even if you get admissions and possibly a confession, don’t stop there if you can keep getting relevant information. You add true value when you can provide a full explanation.
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