Search results

The purpose of this paper is to point out that tax fraud, recognized as a scourge by both governments and responsible tax-payers, hits public finances hard with an inevitable knock-on effect on general welfare. Based on this observation, key players interviewed for this paper, including magistrates, a trade unionist and a high-ranking official, will attempt to provide some possible solutions to help understand why significant sections of public opinion consider this very particular form of financial crime to be legitimate, largely inspired by the notion that tax fraud and evasion are socially acceptable and even seen as a national sport in certain countries.

The survey was carried out among 20 tax officials, a trade unionist, two magistrates and a high-ranking civil servant. The interviewees were carefully chosen for their ability to provide valuable insights into the reasons behind the lenient treatment of fraudsters by a state lacking the necessary means and structures to fight this crime.

The fight against tax fraud has clearly sparked numerous controversies around evaluation, scope, criminal perpetrators and cooperation between services.

Tax fraud, an offence committed with the aim of avoiding taxation or reducing the amount of tax to be paid, ranges from low-level illegal activity, such as undeclared work to make ends meet, to more serious offences, such as value-added tax carousel fraud. All the unpaid tax resulting from such blatant flouting of the law represent a serious loss of revenue for the state and local authorities.

The fight against tax fraud is crucial in determining taxpayers’ acceptance of the contribution required for state expenditure and investment. In a country such as France, where tax fraud is almost a national sport, combating this scourge will help restore the state’s budgetary sovereignty by making it central to people’s concerns about redistributive justice, tax equality and fair access to public goods.

The research focuses on a survey addressed to specialists in the field of financial audit. The purpose is to find out their opinion on aspects related to tax audit, principally in its private but also in its public dimension. Some conclusions are: scope – a high percentage (75 percent) thinks that the scope of a financial audit with respect to tax field should approach all the non‐prescribed tax exercises; tools – the four most important tools used to obtain evidence of a fiscal situation of a company are the following: global similarities (71 percent); external confirmations (56 percent); computer systems (54 percent) and dynamic analysis (53 percent); and responsibility – there exists a slight disagreement about the hypothesis that the auditor may be responsible for the quantification of a probable contingency, but 56.4 percent of the respondents consider the auditor is responsible for a fiscal fraud when (s)he has deliberately hid information about it.

The purpose of this paper is to make readers aware of the extensiveness of healthcare fraud in the USA and how it involves and affects the government, healthcare providers, insurance companies, patients and the public. In addition, recommendations are made that may help control this pervasive type of fraud.

A range of different journal publications, information from government health institutions and law enforcement websites, healthcare fraud cases and healthcare laws are used as a basis to provide information about how fraudsters are committing healthcare fraud and how to prevent this fraud from occurring.

Despite increased funding and prosecution efforts by the government, healthcare fraud continues to be a major threat to the US economy and public. While healthcare fraud will never be eradicated, specific efforts can be deployed to help rein in these complex fraud schemes.

The paper provides a useful resource of information on healthcare fraud for healthcare providers, insurance companies, patients and the public that may help combat healthcare fraud and prevent financial losses.

Every dollar saved from combating fraud could be used to improve access to more or better health services and can, thereby, save lives.

This paper provides recommendations regarding healthcare fraud that could help prevent this large drain on the US economy.

In today's global economy, the public routinely engages in international financial transactions via the internet. This has created opportunities for online fraud. The paper aims to explain what policymakers who are serious about providing crime victims with an effective restitution remedy can learn from the US Government's experience with forfeiture.

The paper, by an Assistant US Attorrney, combines narrative with argument and analysis.

Existing restitution law is ineffective. Prosecutors have used forfeiture laws as an indirect mean of providing compensation for crime victims, but forfeiture law has its limits. The better approach would be for Congress to authorize the pretrial seizure and restraint of assets directly for restitution, utilizing standards comparable to those that exist in current forfeiture law. To address situations where a defendant places money overseas to avoid restitution, Congress should enact international restitution laws comparable to those that exist in forfeiture to facilitate the recovery of those assets. Without these kinds of reforms, the government will continue to struggle to collect restitution.

The paper provides information of value to all involved with international financial transactions and law enforcement activities.

Customs risk management has been widely recognized as a powerful tool to balance between trade facilitation and revenue maximization. However, most customs administrations worldwide, particularly in developing countries, are suffering from a lack of experience and knowledge to assess their risk management systems for revenue protection (RP). Customs risk management has a very limited legacy in the literature. Academic research is quite scarce and very limited, although its relevance to customs administrations. This paper aims to identify the key risk profiles and indicators that contribute to the protection of customs revenue and investigate the role of these risk profiles and indicators on customs RP using the case of Jordan Customs.

This study adopts a panel data approach by using the case of Jordan Customs. Data were collected from the risk targeting and selectivity system at Jordan Customs for the year 2019, a total of 600 observations.

The findings show that all risk targeting criteria except random selectivity (RS) and HS code have a significant positive association with RP. The findings also revealed that RS is an effective tool to prevent traders with fraud and offenses history from a prediction of targeting patterns and to assess the traders’ compliance and make sure their declarations are free from fraud or offenses. Moreover, the findings of this study indicate that customs administrations should adopt alternative programs such as authorized economic operator and post clearance audit as an effective means to measure and improve compliance.

The main contribution of this study lies in proposing a model to assist customs administrations in assessing the performance of risk management systems to protect revenue. This model provides a comprehensive conceptualization and explanations necessary for numerous aspects of risk management projects and it assists to predict the outcomes based on formulated indicators.

This study provides guidelines for risk analysts on how to identify and assess the key risk profiles and indicators that effect on maximizing the detection of revenue leakage and to obtain interpretable and predictable results. In addition, the findings of this study will assist customs administrations in supporting revenue collection, minimizing uncertainty, allocating resources more effectively to target high-risk consignments, while simplifying the procedures for the safe consignments.

This paper is of significant value because it is one of the preliminary studies that empirically identify the risk indicators/profiles that contribute to the protection of revenue and investigate the predictive power of these risk indicators/profiles as a key predictor to protect customs revenue.

This study examines the relation between the likelihood of financial statement fraud and certain corporate governance requirements of the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act and the new rules of the NYSE and the NASDAQ stock markets. Results based upon a logit regression analysis on a sample of 111 fraud firms and 111 matched no‐fraud firms indicate that fraud likelihood is lower when audit committee is comprised solely of independent directors and when audit committee members have smaller number of directorships with other companies. Board of director independence, audit committee expertise and nominating committee independence are not significant variables in reducing fraud likelihood. The study also investigates several other corporate governance variables and finds that fraud likelihood is lower when audit committee has longer tenure and chief executive officer is not chairman of the board. These results highlight two new significant aspects of audit committee: the directorships of its members with other firms and the committee members' tenure. The results have direct implications for further improvement of corporate governance.

Increased fraudulent practices have heightened the need for innovation in anti-fraud programs, necessitating the development of analytics techniques for detecting and preventing fraud. The subject of fraud analytics will continue to expand in the future for public-sector organizations; therefore, this research examined the progress of fraud analytics in public-sector transactions and offers suggestions for its future development.

This study systematically reviewed research on fraud analytics development in public-sector transactions. The review was conducted from June 2021 to June 2023 by identifying research objectives and questions, performing literature quality assessment and extraction, data synthesis and research reporting. The research mainly identified 43 relevant articles that were used as references.

This research examined fraud analytics development related to public-sector financial transactions. The results revealed that fraud analytics expansion has not spread equally, as most programs have been implemented by governments and healthcare organizations in developed countries. This research also exposed that the analytics optimization in fraud prevention is higher than for fraud detection. Such analytics help organizations detect fraud, improve business effectiveness and efficiency, and refine administrative systems and work standards.

This research offers comprehensive insights for researchers and public-sector professionals regarding current fraud analytics development in public-sector financial transactions and future trends.

This study presents the first systematic literature review to investigate the development of fraud analytics in public-sector transactions. The findings can aid scholars' and practitioners' future fraud analytics development.

This paper aims to examine what is meant by economically motivated crime (ECM) and to look at the typologies of offences considered to fall into this category, to analyse the effects of ECM on financial services business and assess the efficacy of steps taken by law enforcement and business to prevent, investigate and mitigate the damage caused by ECM on business.

The paper is based on the session: “Risks to financial institutions presented by economically motivated crime” at the Cambridge 24th International Symposium on Economic Crime.

Much ECM is perpetrated by organised crime on business and the tools available to law enforcement, through legislative instruments and available resources to investigate it, are inadequate. Business does not accord sufficient recognition to the risks posed by ECM and accordingly fails to manage those risks. Models for a Fraud Policy and a Fraud Policy Statement are set out and a higher priority for fraud on the Government agenda for policing is advocated.

The paper addresses the impact fraud has on business and the economies of the world and highlights the threat of financial crime which is affecting everyone.

This study aims to investigate the feasibility of employing a multi-objectives integer-programming model for effective allocation of resources for cyberfraud mitigation. The formulated objectives are the minimisation of the total allocation cost of the anti-fraud capacities and the maximisation of the forensic accounting capacities in all cyberfraud incident prone spots.

From the literature survey conducted and primary qualitative data gathered from the 17 licenced banks in South Africa on fraud investigators, the suggested fraud investigators are the organisation’s finance department, the internal audit committee, the external risk manager, accountants and forensic accountants. These five human resource capacities were considered for the formulation of the multi-objectives integer programming (MOIP) model. The MOIP model is employed for the optimisation of the employed capacities for cyberfraud mitigation to ensure the effective allocation and utilisation of human resources. Thus, the MOIP model is validated by a genetic algorithm (GA) solver to obtain the Pareto-optimum solution without the violation of the identified constraints.

The formulated objective functions are optimised simultaneously. The Pareto front for the two objectives of the MOIP model comprises the set of optimal solutions, which are not dominated by any other feasible solution. These are the feasible choices, which indicate the suitability of the MOIP to achieve the set objectives.

The results obtained indicate the feasibility of simultaneously achieving the minimisation of the total allocation cost of the anti-fraud capacities, or the maximisation of the forensic accounting capacities in all cyberfraud incident prone spots – or the trade-off between them, if they cannot be reached simultaneously. This study recommends the use of an iterative MOIP framework for decision-makers which may aid decision-making with respect to the allocation and utilisation of human resources.

The originality of this work lies in the development of multi-objectives integer-programming model for effective allocation of resources for cyberfraud mitigation.