Thesis (Ph.D.)--RAND Graduate School, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis is an investigation of the law of damages for misrepresentation at common law and under the Misrepresentation Act, 1967. It makes three principal claims. First, the relationship that must exist between the making of a false statement and the claimant's reliance on it is one of necessity. In applying this test to individual cases, there is no rule of law that the non-breach position is always that the defendant would have said nothing or that he would have disclosed the truth: it simply depends on what a reasonable defendant would in fact have done. Secondly, the scope of liability for negligent misrepresentation is governed by what this thesis describes as the 'falsity rule'. This is the rule that a loss must be a consequence not only of the making of a false statement but also of its falsity. The rule can be traced to the late nineteenth century and is the best explanation of the SAAMCO case. Contrary to the current orthodoxy, SAAMCO does not in fact endorse the risk theory of remoteness which, in any event, is flawed both as a description of the law and as a matter of principle. Thirdly, the measure of damages under section 2(1) of the 1967 Act is the deceit measure and the measure under section 2(2) is the monetary equivalent of rescission. These provisions have given rise to difficulty principally because their legislative history has not been closely analysed. In truth, Parliament enacted section 2(1) in the mistaken belief that the common law distinguishes between deceit and negligence only for the purpose of actionability, not damages, but a mistake of this kind is conceptually distinct from a mistake about the conventional meaning of words or syntax. For these reasons, it is argued that Royscot is correctly decided but that William Sindall, with respect, is not.

Insurance fraud is perhaps one of the most pressing problems challenging the insurance industry. The judiciary plays a significant role in tackling insurance fraud: the burden is on their shoulders to identify the appropriate legal rules governing fraudulent claims and determining the consequences of fraud. However, regrettably, this process has long remained elusive and in the recent decades the courts have tried but failed to formulate clear principles for the treatment of insurance fraud, so the process is, still, continuing. This judicial process is not free from difficulty particularly with regard to the consequence of presenting fraudulent claims. The failure of judicial attempt to formulate clear principles in this jurisdiction has attracted the attention of the Law Commissions which intend to pursue a reform at the legislative level. At the current stage, the law seems to stand at a turning point and try to adapt itself to the new situation. The author is of the opinion that this is the right time to provide a full-scale research in the jurisdiction of insurance fraudulent claims for the purpose of identifying the existing difficulties and confusions, shaping the appropriate legal regime and contributing to the evolving reform process of English insurance contract law. The author is also of the opinion that considering the viability of reform proposals from a novel perspective, namely economics and law, might add a very interesting dimension to the debate. It is believed that the law and economics debate would be helpful in explaining the outcomes of certain legal solutions and identifying the most appropriate legal remedy. Finally, the author also intends to examine to what extent the Law Commissions' proposal could be defended in the light of author's legal and economic analysis.

abstract: Using historical data from the third-party payment acquiring industry, I develop a statistical model to predict the probability of fraudulent transactions by the merchants. The model consists of two levels of analysis – the first focuses on fraud detection at the store level, and the second focuses on fraud detection at the merchant level by aggregating store level data to the merchant level for merchants with multiple stores. My purpose is to put the model into business operations, helping to identify fraudulent merchants at the time of transactions and thus mitigate the risk exposure of the payment acquiring businesses. The model developed in this study is distinct from existing fraud detection models in three important aspects. First, it predicts the probability of fraud at the merchant level, as opposed to at the transaction level or by the cardholders. Second, it is developed by applying machine learning algorithms and logistical regressions to all the transaction level and merchant level variables collected from real business operations, rather than relying on the experiences and analytical abilities of business experts as in the development of traditional expert systems. Third, instead of using a small sample, I develop and test the model using a huge sample that consists of over 600,000 merchants and 10 million transactions per month. I conclude this study with a discussion of the model’s possible applications in practice as well as its implications for future research. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Business Administration 2015

The purpose, of my thesis, was to extend results of my previous thesis concerning ethics in accounting. Mainly in the field of accounting fraud detection and prevention. First, I referred to ethics in accounting, financial fraud, risks resulting from its insufficient sentencing and specific types of fraud. Secondly, I described methods of accounting fraud detection and prevention. Among others internal audit, whistleblowing, software, preventive controls, confirmation of work history and education presented on a job application, authority limits, reviews of third-party transactions, ethical leadership and zero tolerance. At the end I found out what the views and experience of companies were by means of online question-form. My questions included presence of code of conduct in the company, types of frauds encountered, means of prevention used and more. I also described three concrete examples, based on verdicts of The Supreme Court, relating to economic crime.

Humans have always used sketches to explain the visual world. It is a simple and straight- forward mean to communicate new ideas and designs. Consequently, as in almost every aspect of our modern life, the relatively recent major developments in computer science have highly contributed to enhancing individual sketching experience. The literature of sketch related research has witnessed seminal advancements and a large body of interest- ing work. Following up with this rich literature, this dissertation provides a holistic study on sketches through three proposed novel models including sketch analysis, transfer, and geometric representation. The first part of the dissertation targets sketch authorship recognition and analysis of sketches. It provides answers to the following questions: Are simple strokes unique to the artist or designer who renders them? If so, can this idea be used to identify authorship or to classify artistic drawings? The proposed stroke authorship recognition approach is a novel method that distinguishes the authorship of 2D digitized drawings. This method converts a drawing into a histogram of stroke attributes that is discriminative of authorship. Extensive classification experiments on a large variety of datasets are conducted to validate the ability of the proposed techniques to distinguish unique authorship of artists and designers. The second part of the dissertation is concerned with sketch style transfer from one free- hand drawing to another. The proposed method exploits techniques from multi-disciplinary areas including geometrical modeling and image processing. It consists of two methods of transfer: stroke-style and brush-style transfer. (1) Stroke-style transfer aims to transfer the style of the input sketch at the stroke level to the style encountered in other sketches by other artists. This is done by modifying all the parametric stroke segments in the input, so as to minimize a global stroke-level distance between the input and target styles. (2) Brush-style transfer, on the other hand, focuses on transferring a unique brush look of a line drawing to the input sketch. In this transfer stage, we use an automatically constructed input brush dictionary to infer which sparse set of input brush elements are used at each location of the input sketch. Then, a one-to-one mapping between input and target brush elements is learned by sparsely encoding the target sketch with the input brush dictionary. The last part of the dissertation targets a geometric representation of sketches, which is vital in enabling automatic sketch analysis, synthesis and manipulation. It is based on utilizing the well known convolutional sparse coding (CSC) model. We observe that CSC is closely related to how line sketches are drawn. This process can be approximated as the sparse spatial localization of a number of typical basic strokes, which in turn can be cast as a non-standard CSC model that forms a line drawing from parametric curves. These curves are learned to optimize the fit between the model and a specific set of line drawings. Each part of the dissertation shows the utility of the proposed methods through a variety of experiments, user studies, and proposed applications.

Auditors perform a very important task within the context of the affairs of a company because financial reporting can only serve its purpose if stakeholders can rely on its accuracy and reliability. An auditor’s duty is to opine whether an entity’s financial reporting has been done according to the requirements of the law. The responsibility of reporting according to the law lies with an entity’s directors. Auditors cannot issue an absolute assurance as to the lawfulness and reliability of an entity’s financial reporting. However when it is subsequently discovered that the financial reporting was incorrect and that fraud has occurred auditors are often blamed and sued for enormous amounts of money for failing to detect material anomalies in the financial reports. These actions are based on the fact that auditors have a duty to exercise reasonable care and skill in the performance of their duties and through their failure to act as such, have caused financial harm to the clients or third parties. The fact that auditors are only required by law to exercise reasonable care and skill and perform an audit according to the standards of the reasonable auditor and not the most meticulous one, is often not regarded or is sometimes deliberately ignored. This clearly represents a problem in our law, namely that the presence of fraud in financial reports does not in itself suggest negligence on the part of the auditor but is apparently often perceived to do so. This research shows that the auditor’s duty of reasonable care and skill does not necessarily entail the duty to detect fraud. The elements of the duty of reasonable care and skill are identified from case law, legislation and international auditing standards. In order to limit the liability of auditors in general it is important to focus also on the elements of fault (negligence), wrongfulness and causation. This research shows that negligence cannot be established merely by the presence of fraud or material misstatements in financial statements. The responsibility for fair financial reporting lies with the directors. This research gives prominence to this fact which often seems to be ignored for convenience and in order to place the blame on the auditors. This research implicitly asks the question, why are auditors being held responsible for material misstatements in a company’s financial statements and not the directors? Guidelines for determining the extent of an auditor’s liability in this regard are formulated in this research.

The thesis deals with the Sarbanes -- Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX). Reasons leading to its acceptance and the consequences are analysed. The costs and benefits of SOX implementation are compared from the individual and global view. The process of implementation is explained on the example of purchasing and account payable.

The aim of this Master´s Thesis is to introduce fraudulent schemes within organizations and suggest possible actions to prevent this unjust behaviour that negatively affects not only organizations themselves, but also society as a whole. Audit, which is described in the first chapter, plays a major part in preventing fraud. The evolution of audit is described there as well as its main divisions consisting of external, internal and forensic audit, which is important for the investigation of fraud. Second chapter describes fraud as itself, dividing it into external and, more common, internal fraud, which is divided into corruption, asset misappropriations and financial statement fraud. This chapter also contains cybercrime, which is increasingly relevant nowadays. Detailed fraud statistics put together profile of the typical fraudster. Third chapter describes some real fraud cases within business practice. It contains four fraud cases, namely those in companies Enron, Toshiba, Target and Czech corruption scandal concerning former politician David Rath.

The current thesis examined the relationships between personality and attitudes and behaviours related to insurance claims, insurance fraud, and credit use. The thesis incorporates a systematic literature review of Impulsivity-related personality traits. This review led to the identification and development of a six factor framework of Impulsivity-related traits (Impetuousness, Self-Regulation, Deferred-Gratification, Consideration of Future Consequences or CFC, Attention, and Sensation Seeking). The framework was subsequently used to classify existing “Impulsivity” measures so that coherent review of research linking “Impulsivity” to financial behaviour could be undertaken. The framework guided review revealed that four Impulsivity-related traits (Impetuousness, Self-Regulation, Deferred-Gratification, CFC) appeared to be influential across a number of financial behaviours and as a result could be considered somewhat ‘central’ to financial behaviour. Accordingly, these four traits were assessed in each of the three empirical studies. In addition, each study also included a number of outcome specific traits. These were traits likely to be of importance to the specific outcome variables in each study but were unlikely to be related to economic behaviour across multiple domains. In Study 1 (n = 377), the central Impulsivity-related traits and the outcome specific traits of Compulsivity, Oppositionality, Risk-Taking, and Sensation Seeking were assessed in relation to Attitudes Towards Insurance Claims and the number of previously submitted motor and home insurance claims. The results revealed that Deferred-Gratification, CFC and Self-Regulation accounted for 36% of the variance in Attitudes Towards Insurance Claims, whilst a combined demographic, attitude and personality model was able to correctly classify participants as previous claimants or non-claimants in 84% of cases for motor claims and 66% of cases for home claims. In Study 2 (n = 475), the central Impulsivity-related traits and the outcome specific traits of Callousness, Conduct Problems, Dishonest-Opportunism, Integrity, Machiavellianism, and Pessimism were assessed in relation to Attitudes Towards Insurance Fraud and previously submitted motor and home insurance claims. The results revealed that Dishonest-Opportunism, Consideration of Future Consequences, Pessimism, Age and Educational Attainment accounted for 58% of the variance in Attitudes Towards Insurance Claims, whilst a combined demographic, attitude and personality model was able to correctly classify participants as previous claimants or non-claimants in 78% of cases for motor claims but did not predict home claims. In Study 3 (n = 611), the central Impulsivity-related traits and the outcome specific traits of Anxiety, Compulsivity, Insecure Attachment and Narcissism, were shown to be differentially predictive of five self-report financial behaviour factors (Irresponsible Spending, Financial Planning, Emotional Spending, Impulsive Credit Use and Poor Credit Management; 30-50% variance explained), the number of credit cards and loans owned (≈22% variance explained), and debt (11-15% variance explained). Finally, the personality traits were seated within a meditational model of: Personality → Credit Acquisition and Financial Behaviour → Debt. This model was strongly supported and accounted for 26% of the variance in loan debt and 31% of the variance in credit card debt.