Business owners' lack of strategies to prevent and detect occupational fraud in small retail businesses in the United States could result in substantial financial losses or insolvency. Grounded in Cressey's fraud triangle, the purpose of this multiple case study was to explore internal control strategies 6 owners of small retail businesses in southeastern Pennsylvania used to prevent and detect occupational fraud. Face-to-face interviews, observations, and documentation are the data collection techniques I used in this study. Data were transcribed, coded, analyzed, and member checked to identify emergent themes. Six themes emerged from the thematic analysis: financial impact, transaction responsibility and monitoring, networking and business models, communication, separation of duties, and training. The results of this study indicated areas for action that owners of small retail businesses could take to prevent and detect occupational fraud. Strategies business owners could implement to protect their businesses from occupational fraud include monitoring, employee identity documents to track employee activity, separation of duties, and communication with employees. The implications of this study for positive social change include the potential for social entrepreneurship because small business owners create employment opportunities for members of the community, including high school students with the desire to run small retail businesses. Small business owners serve their communities by focusing on wealth distribution, including donations to local charities that foster economic stability with positive effects on society.

When economic crime is discovered it tends to result in solutions that strengthen the audit. In 2010 a law was adopted which reduced the influence of the audit. The reform gave the smallest companies the opportunity to actively refrain external audit. That can be seen as remarkable as the auditors are the primary control organ of smaller companies. The reform was introduced to simplify the administrative burden and reduce its costs. This qualitative study aims to explain the factors that have been affected by the abolition of auditing based on the auditors' perspective. By answering the research questions: What are the effects caused by the elimination of auditing requirements for smaller companies from the auditor's perspective? What does the financial crime look like in these companies and what factors affect the auditors' decision-making regarding eco-crime? What affects individuals' inclination to commit financial crime? The aim of this study is to chart the factors that have been affected by the elimination of auditing for small companies from the perspective of auditors. Furthermore, the study aims to increase the understanding of the interplay between company stakeholders, small companies and auditors, as there is currently no qualitative research in this area. The research questions are answered using collected secondary data and qualitative interviews. The conclusion of the study suggests that the abolition meant that business leaders without the necessary skills now produce the annual report and the current accounts. Further effects that have arisen are that authorities have increased workload due to both poor annual reports and that audit work has to some extent been shifted from auditors to government agencies. The bolition has also resulted in an increased incidence of economic crime. The factors that affect he auditors' inclination to report criminal acts are primarily; transaction size, the individual's wareness of the crime, the motivation behind it, the customer's inclination to remedy the act and the parties concerned by the action. The study indicates that there is a correlation between the existence of financial crime and high frequency of cash handling. The factors that influence an individual to commit crimes are corporate culture. In the companies where employees commit financial crime, mainly lack of internal control is seen as the reason.

Small businesses have an important role to play in the U.S. economy. However, employee fraud can jeopardize the sustainability of small businesses. Grounded on Cressey's fraud triangle theory, the purpose of this multiple case study was to explore strategies used by selected managers and owners of small retail businesses to detect and prevent employee fraud. Ten participants from 5 small retail businesses participated in the study. Nine participated in a face-to-face semistructured interview, and 1 participated in a telephone interview. These participants included 5 owners and 5 managers of small retail businesses in the state of Michigan in the United States who have implemented strategies to detect and prevent employee fraud. Through a process of methodological triangulation, casual observations and documentary evidence supplemented data collected through semistructured interviews. Using thematic analysis by coding narrative segments, the research findings included themes of controls and communication, cash register accountability, segregation of duties, monitoring, and action against perpetrators. Managers and owners of small businesses may benefit from the findings of this study by gaining awareness of the need to detect and prevent employee fraud. The implications for positive social change may include the potential to increase appropriate controls over employee fraud, thus enabling owners of small retail business an opportunity to operate effectively and efficiently, which could increase employment opportunities. Increased employment opportunities could create a positive effect on other small retail businesses and allow local communities to prosper.

The ability of auditors to detect fraud, including intentional material misstatements in earnings, remains key to the credibility of audit firms and confidence in capital markets. The PCAOB concludes from its most recent inspections of public company audits that auditors often fail to assess and respond to risks of material misreporting by management. In a behavioral experiment, this study concludes that auditors can increase sensitivity to management motivation to misreport by actively seeking to transform identified risk factors focused on the organization, into factors focused on top managers, and to evaluate whether these manager-focused risk factors represent incentives for personal gain or pressures to avoid a personal loss on the managers. Currently, auditing standards use incentive and pressure as interchangeable constructs, but auditors in this study assess pressure on managers to avoid a loss as a greater risk than an incentive to managers to attain a gain. Results also demonstrate that auditors will be made more sensitive to fraudulent financial reporting risk when focusing on pressure on top managers, than they will be by engaging in a traditional process of assessing total fraud risk based on the three fraud triangle elements. This study is the first to propose a theoretical explanation for why prior studies reflect auditor insensitivity to organizational level fraud risk factors. This study is also the first to enhance knowledge about auditor risk assessment and decision-making through the application of prospect theory and through disaggregation of one of the three elements of the fraud triangle model, by differentiating between incentive and pressure for misreporting earnings.

Financial fraud in church organizations is increasing rapidly, which can affect the reputation, donation appeal, future funding, and ability of church organizations to meet their planned organizational goals. The purpose of this multiple case study was to explore strategies for preventing financial fraud in church organizations. The conceptual framework for the study was Cressey’s fraud triangle theory. Twenty participants who utilize strategies for preventing financial fraud in their organizations were purposively selected from 5 church organizations in Ghana. Data were collected through semistructured interviews and analysis of organizational financial policy documents. Interview data were transcribed, coded, and analyzed with Saldaña’s coding guidelines. Data analysis followed recommendations from Yin, including examining the data, grouping data into categories, regrouping data in themes, interpreting the data, and producing empirically based findings that answered the central research question of the study. Three significant themes emerged from the data analysis: effective administration, good stewardship and accountability, and caliber of employees. Implementation of the findings may lead to positive social change by enhancing the donation appeal of church organizations, improving their finances, and enabling them to optimize their operations to benefit individuals, families, communities, and society.

The central focus of this dissertation study is to understand the impact of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the factors that contribute to increased risk of fraud in order to determine why fraud may occur despite the imposed regulation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. The main premise of the study tests the application of the fraud triangle framework constructs to publicly traded restaurant companies during the time period of 2002-2014, using proxy variables defined through literature. Essentially, the study seeks to identify the factors that may provide the optimal criteria to engage in fraudulent or opportunistic behavior. The fraud triangle theoretical framework is comprised of the constructs of pressure, opportunity and rationalization, and has mostly been utilized by external auditors to assess the fraud risk of various companies. It has never been applied to the restaurant industry, and the proxy variables selected have never before been tested in a comprehensive model. Thus, a major contribution of this study may enable executive managers to assess the fraud triangle conditions according to the model in order to afford conclusions regarding increased risk of fraud. The study first hypothesized that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act has had a significant impact on detecting increased risk of fraud for publicly traded restaurant companies. Additionally, the study controlled for and tested the proxy variables of the fraud triangle constructs to determine if any of the variables had a significant impact on detecting increased risk of fraud for publicly traded restaurant companies. The variables tested included company size, debt, employee turnover, organizational structure, international sales growth, executive stock compensation, return on assets, the Recession, and macro-economic factors of interest, inflation, and unemployment rates. The research study adopted an exploratory research design using the case of publicly traded United States restaurant companies in order to provide a better understanding of the characteristics that may contribute to increased fraud risk. The study assumed a binary distribution of the dependent variable, increased fraud risk, measured by the incidence of a reported internal control deficiency over the testable time period. Specifically, the study employed a probit model to estimate the probability that an entity or company will be at an increased risk of fraud based on the independent variables that support and are linked to the fraud triangle framework. Additionally, the model assumes equal weight to the variables of the fraud triangle framework. Through use of the probit model, the major findings of the study were as follows: First, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act does have a significant impact on highlighting areas of increased fraud risk for publicly traded restaurant companies. Second, for the total population of restaurant companies, only the Recession, interest rates, inflation rates and unemployment rates are significant indicators of increased fraud risk. None of the internal variables were significant. However, once the data was segmented by type of restaurant, the results revealed significance of both internal and external variables. These results imply a couple of theoretical notions: first, that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act is an effective means for detecting risk of fraud for publicly traded restaurant companies when considering variables that support the fraud triangle; second, that the fraud triangle is contextual when applied to the restaurant industry because only the variables that are outside of managements control were significant. Finally, from a managerial perspective, the study provides evidence that macro-economic conditions that might affect consumer demand may increase the risk of fraud for publicly traded restaurant companies.

Regulation Crowdfunding, enacted in May 2016, is intended to facilitate capital formation in startups and small businesses funded primarily by small investors (Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 2016b). This dissertation investigates (1) the risk of fraud in equity crowdfunding offerings and (2) whether investors respond to fraud signals by selecting (rejecting) offers with low (high) fraud risk. Because equity crowdfunding is quite new, no frauds have yet been identified. Therefore, I employ a predictive analytics tool, Benford’s Law, to assess the fraud risk of the offering. I select observable indicators to represent the Fraud Triangle dimensions—incentives, opportunities and rationalization—and test if they predict fraud risk. I also compare offer funding outcomes to my fraud risk assessments to identify if investors’ selections consider fraud risk appropriately. The relaxed auditor assurance and disclosure requirements attracts both honest and dishonest founders, but I find that the risk of fraud is higher in equity crowdfunding offers than in public offerings as reported by other studies. I find that there are several individual fraud indicators and models that explain fraud risk, but these do not predict whether the offer is funded or not (funding outcomes) or the amount that is raised if funded. This dissertation is the first to apply Benford’s Law to equity crowdfunding offers and map fraud attributes to fraud risk and funding outcomes. My dissertation can inform investors, issuers, regulators, intermediaries and practitioners of the high risk of fraud in equity crowdfunding offerings and of several noteworthy fraud indicators. / Business Administration/Accounting

Abstract State-Corporate Crime in Swedish – A prestudy in definitions and opportunity structures The purpose of this study was to, through Swedish cases of state-corporate crime, raise the concept in a Swedish context and study whether there were specific opportunity structures in Swedish conditions and analyze this trough criminological theory. The data collection method consisted of a media and literature review, where the selection was based on the concept of state-corporate crime. The data was then studied through a crime script analysis, and finally analyzed in a comparative case study. The Swedish cases that were found were: the Bofors affairs, the Saudi agreement, the JAS affairs and the Telia affairs. These constituted examples of both State initiated corporate crime and State facilitated corporate crime and turned out to have similar opportunity structures. Which consisted of pressure for profit, criminal tools in the form of bribes and middlemen, and of neutralization techniques. The result match Cressey's fraud triangle theory of pressure, opportunity, and rationalization. / Sammanfattning State-Corporate Crime på svenska – En förstudie i definitioner och tillfällesstrukturer Syftet med denna studie var att genom svenska fall av state-corporate crime dels lyfta begreppet i en svensk kontext, dels undersöka om specifika tillfällesstrukturer gjorde sig gällande i svenska förhållanden samt analysera dessa mot kriminologisk teori. Datainsamlingsmetoden utgjorde en media- och litteraturgenomgång där urvalet grundade sig i begreppsapparaten state-corporate crime. Det empiriska materialet undersöktes sedan genom en skriptanalys, för att avslutningsvis analyseras i en jämförande fallstudie. De kända svenska fall som påträffades var Boforsaffärerna, Saudiavtalet, JAS-affärerna samt Telia-affärerna. Dessa utgjorde exempel på både State initiated corporate crime och State facilitated corporate crime och visade sig ha liknande mönster av tillfällesstrukturer. Tillfällesstrukturerna bestod övergripande i en press om vinst, brottsliga verktyg i form av mutor och mellanhänder samt av neutraliseringstekniker. Vilket är förenligt med Cresseys teori om fraud triangle.

This paper deals with the subject of fraud investigation. Fraud investigation and forensic audit as such are defined in the first part of the paper. Requirements to become a fraud investigator are described in the next part. A theory surrounding frauds is also presented (incl. most common fraud schemes, fraud triangle etc.). The author also describes foreign anti-corruption legislation which has power to punish corruption which took place on the soil of Czech Republic. An example of how breach of FCPA in the Czech Republic has been investigated is presented by the end of the paper.

On average, a small business could lose $150,000 a year due to employee fraud schemes. For most of the small businesses affected by employee fraud schemes, the average $150,000 loss could be detrimental to the small business, causing the business to close. The purpose of this multiple case study was to explore the internal controls small business owners apply to detect and prevent fraud from occurring in the business. The population for the study consisted of 3 small business owners located in Hartsville, South Carolina who implemented effective internal fraud controls in their business. The conceptual framework guiding the study was the fraud triangle theory. Data were collected and triangulated through semistructured interviews, company internal control policy and procedure documents, the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission internal control framework, and the Small Business Administration internal control good practices. Data were analyzed through coding. There were 3 themes which emerged in relation to addressing the central research question: cash collection, separation of duties, and attentiveness and awareness. The findings could contribute to positive social change by providing best practices for small business owners to mitigate the components of the fraud triangle and subsequently decrease, if not eliminate, fraud from occurring in small businesses.