Beyond the fraud triangle: Swiss and Austrian elite fraudsters

Alexander Schuchter and Michael Levi

Accounting Forum, 2015, vol. 39, issue 3, 176-187

Abstract: We suggest that when using the fraud triangle, academics and professionals should take account of the insights gleaned from our study, in which Switzerland and Austria's “elite” white-collar offenders with high professional standing and respectability were interviewed. Our perpetrators consider that only opportunity is a universal precondition of acts defined by others as fraud, though perceived pressure is salient to most frauds. By contrast, financial incentives are not required to be motivational elements. The frequently cited “rationalisation” is too simplistic: rather, a fraud-inhibiting inner voice before the crime and a guilty conscience after it were present among those interviewed.

Date: 2015
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1016/j.accfor.2014.12.001 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:accfor:v:39:y:2015:i:3:p:176-187

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/racc20

DOI: 10.1016/j.accfor.2014.12.001

Access Statistics for this article

Accounting Forum is currently edited by Carol Tilt

More articles in Accounting Forum from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().