Fraud is a growing problem that costs the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars each year. The purpose of this course is to help participants understand the nature of fraud, profile who commits it and why, and learn how to prevent it from occurring and detect it when it does occur.

• Nature and elements of a typical fraud.
• Types of fraud: fraudulent financial reporting, misappropriation of assets, vendor fraud, customer fraud, and investment fraud.
• Who commits fraud: profile of the typical fraud perpetrator.
• Social forces contributing to fraud.
• Three-step fraud process: commit, conceal, convert to personal use.
• Why fraud occurs: fraud triangle of pressures, opportunities, and lack of personal integrity.
• The pressures that motivate fraud.
• Opportunities that allow fraud to occur.
• Rationalizations that allow perpetrators to excuse their lack of integrity.
• Fraud prevention: a three-pronged approach.
  • Minimizing financial, work-related, and lifestyle pressures that motivate fraud,
  • Minimizing opportunities that allow fraud to occur,
  • Maximizing personal integrity.
• How fraud symptoms can help alert individuals when a fraud has occurred.
• Fraud-symptom categories (financial statement, unusual relationships, accounting, organizational, related party, outsider relationships, internal control, personal conduct, informant, lifestyle, and corporate culture).
• Specific fraud symptoms and examples of how they can tip-off the presence of fraud.
• Fraud-detection techniques.
• The collapse of Enron, World Com, Adelphia, etc.
• The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002
• SAS 99

Many real live cases of fraud are used to illustrate its concepts and preventative applications.

Field of study: Auditing