Boiling the Frog Slowly: The Immersion of C-Suite Financial Executives into Fraud

Ikseon Suh (), John T. Sweeney (), Kristina Linke () and Joseph M. Wall ()
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Ikseon Suh: University of Nevada, Las Vegas
John T. Sweeney: University of Kansas, School of Business
Kristina Linke: University of Groningen
Joseph M. Wall: Marquette University

Journal of Business Ethics, 2020, vol. 162, issue 3, No 10, 645-673

Abstract: Abstract This study explores how financial executives retrospectively account for their crossing the line into financial statement fraud while acting within or reacting to a financialized corporate environment. We conduct our investigation through face-to-face interviews with 13 former C-suite financial executives who were involved in and indicted for major cases of accounting fraud. Five different themes of accounts emerged from the narratives, characterizing executives’ fraud immersion as a meaning-making process by which the particulars of the proximal social context (the influence of social actors and contextual characteristics) and individual motivations collectively molded executives’ vocabularies of fraud immersion. Our executives’ narratives portray their fraud entanglement as typically occurring in small, incremental steps. Their accounts expand our understanding of the influence of socialization on executive-level financial fraud beyond the individualized focus of the fraud triangle model.

Keywords: Financial statement fraud; Incrementalism; Slippery slope; Socialization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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DOI: 10.1007/s10551-018-3982-3

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