Association of Certified Fraud Examiners
Overview: Organizations face numerous risks to their success; economic risk, disaster risk, supply-chain risk, regulatory risk, and technology risk all affect organizations in different ways and to varying degrees. While fraud risk is just one of the many entries on this list, it is universally faced by all business and government entities. Any organization with assets is in danger of those resources being targeted by dishonest individuals. And, unfortunately, a notable portion of that threat comes from the very people who have been hired to carry out the organization’s operations. It is this risk—the risk of occupational fraud1—that the first Report to the Nation on Occupational Fraud and Abuse was published in 1996 to explore.
In the twenty years since the inaugural report was released, our continuing research on these topics has not only come to represent the largest collection of occupational fraud cases ever analyzed, but has also illuminated several notable trends in how such fraud is committed, how it is detected, and how organizations combat this threat. The stated goals of the 2016 report are the same as those of its predecessors:
- To summarize the opinions of experts on the percentage of organizational revenue lost to fraud each year;
- To categorize the ways in which occupational fraud occurs;
- To analyze the characteristics of the individuals who commit occupational fraud;
- To examine the characteristics of the organizations that are victimized by occupational fraud.
