Author: Prof Alan Doig
ISBN No: 1 84392 172 3
Review date: 13/12/2025
No of pages: 254
Publisher: Willan
Year of publication: 11/09/2012
Brief:
UK academics have barely touched on fraud, admits Prof Alan Doig in his round-up of the subject.
Arguably most useful is Doig’s last chapter, discussing the likely future. It quotes the July 2006 final report of the Government’s Fraud Review Team. As Doig adds, much of it goes over old ground and ‘half-forgotten initiatives’ (remember ‘Partners Against Crime’, from 2000, whereby police would accredit investigators?). The landscape is that police have retreated from fraud investigation, to higher-priority work. That leaves, as Doig writes, a distinct difference of approach between the private and public sectors: “The private secotr is about net profit, minimising risk and complying with regulatory requirements.” That is, he adds, a company can simply close a high-risk business, accept some loss, and bring in investigators when required. The public sector,he suggests, because of politics, puts more into internal anti-fraud (in terms of staff numbers) than the private sector or police. Doig gives brief pen-portraits of consultancy Control Risks, the National Health Service’s Counter Fraud and Security Management Service, a bank and building society, among others. The Teesside University professor covers a lot of ground – chapters on the cost and harm of fraud; who does it and why; and investigations. Fraudsters, he concludes, patrol ‘the cracks between common sense, effective compliance, organisational change, and individual, corportae and political ambition’. To repeat, Doig – like other books in the series, covering street crime, car crime and so on – offers a useful digest of the subject, and a bibliography. It’s hardly his fault, but one comes away feeling how much is unknown about fraud – the amounts, and reasons. Why, doing the same job, one worker does not forge, fiddle, or turn corrupt, and another does? What of morals and religion? Charities and churches merit a fraud study. Security and fraud manager readers may prefer what Doig terms the ‘practitioner authors’ such as Mike Comer.
