Factors that Determine a Private investigator fee
PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS IN SINGAPORE
You have been scouting around for a private investigator and have quotations from potential investigators who will not dent your pockets and now you have to make a decision on whom to choose. Whatever reason you would have to want to engage the services of a private investigator, before hiring him or her, you must have considered their private investigator fee. Before you decide to fork out the money, you should first understand how the private investigator arrived at his or her investigator fees. Each and every investigator has his or her method of determining the fees charged to you; However, I will discuss those that will be universal to most of the private investigators. But before we go any further, as a word of caution, please make sure that the private investigators under consideration are duly registered by the relevant authorities. This will save you from dealing with quacks.
The first universal factor that a private investigator considers is the complexity of the project. Complexity is determined by the intricacies of the activities to be carried out in order to achieve the objective of carrying out the private investigation. The more the activities that has to be carried out, the higher the private investigator fee. For instance, a private investigator will charge you less to find the phone number of your high school sweet heart which basically requires minimal or no travel and no extra personnel as compared to the cost that he or she will incur when carrying out a fraud investigation that has a large amount of money on the line as it will require a lot of leg work, personnel to trace down leads as well as telephone and travel costs. The simpler the information is to obtain, the less the amount of money you will be charged by the investigator.
Another determinant of the private investigator fee is the main objective of the investigation. How far back in time do you want the investigator to go? Remember digging up information on an individual’s past is a time consuming affair. The deeper into the past you would like the investigator to dig, the more you will have to part with. If the objective of the investigation is to find dirt on a potential in-law, the cost will be more as compared to an investigation to follow around your spouse for the week that he or she is on holiday to make sure that they are where they said they would be. This is because digging up dirt on someone would require a considerable amount of man hour and background checks as far back as when they were in high school which is quite frankly, a tasking objective for the investigators.
Other factors that a private investigator would consider in determining his or her investigative fee will be guided by the travel and accommodation costs, the urgency of the information needed, the hours required to carry out the investigation, his or her area of expertise and the man power he will require as well as the cost of operations. The private investigator fee will be a reflection on how much travelling, time and man power will be required to carry out the investigation. Furthermore, his or her area of expertise is quite important because it will determine whether or not she/he will outsource some of the activities required to achieve the goal of the investigation; thus it will increase his or her fees. The kind of evidence you require, be it video, audio, photographic, audio-visual, will also factor the investigator’s fee. Operation costs include printing, processing of audio-visual materials among others. Lastly, remember that you will get what you pay for, so make sure the private investigator gives you value for money spent!