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Prevention and Control of Financial Fraud: a Scoping Review

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Abstract

As awareness has grown internationally of the harms caused by financial fraud, there has been a concomitant increase in efforts to prevent and control it. Despite this growing awareness, the literature addressing measures against financial fraud has not yet been systematically reviewed or synthesised. On the basis of a scoping literature review, this study provides a structured overview of the literature on prevention and control measures targeting financial fraud (n = 159). We classify these measures on the basis of four functions specified by Maesschalck and Bertók (2009): “determining and defining,” “guiding,” “monitoring,” and “enforcing.” Looking at a period of just over 20 years, we see that a growing number of studies have been published on this topic, with most focusing on “monitoring” (k = 98) and the least on “enforcing” (k = 37). With 11.3% and 12.0% of the studies respectively, both criminology and Europe are less represented in the literature than expected. Most studies are cross-sectional, many are methodologically weak, and they all provide only limited information on the effectiveness or the costs of the anti-fraud measures. The literature is thus not up to the challenge of facing what has become one of the most frequent and threatening crimes worldwide. In the conclusion, we sketch an agenda for future research to help address this gap.

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Notes

  1. “Prevention” and “control” measures are not mutually exclusive: the implementation of criminal laws, for example, serves both repressive and, through deterrence, preventive functions.

  2. COSO is a private-sector initiative dedicated to improving organisational performance and governance through effective internal control, enterprise risk management, and fraud deterrence (COSO. Retrieved from http://www.coso.org/Pages/Default.Aspx on 6 December 2021).

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank the participants of the consultation exercise and the anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments and suggestions.

Funding

The study is part of the Prevention of Fraud in Sports (PrOFS) project. Research Foundation Flanders granted funding for this project within their Strategic Basic Research (SBO) funding scheme (grant number S005521N).

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  1. Leuven Institute of Criminology, Faculty of Law and Criminology, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Sofie Gotelaere & Letizia Paoli

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  1. Sofie Gotelaere
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Correspondence to Sofie Gotelaere.

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Gotelaere, S., Paoli, L. Prevention and Control of Financial Fraud: a Scoping Review. Eur J Crim Policy Res (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10610-022-09532-8

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