Why people commit fraud

An overview of Donald Cressey's fraud triangle and its relevance to banking.

Photo by Jefferson Santos on Unsplash

This post is a twin of my last one on Teaching Ethics in Management and Accounting because they originated in my reading of two related articles on fraud by Seb Murray (Financial Times, 13 June 2022). However, as the post became too unwieldy, I decided it would be better to split it in two.

This post takes off from a passing reference to Donald Cressey in another recent post on Strategic Risk in Banking. Another post on Fraud, Terrorism, and Bathtub mentioned how those who want to commit fraud learn the loopholes over time. Those loopholes provide the opportunity for fraud, as discussed below. The discerning reader may also find in this post a resonance of the determining factors mentioned in yet another post on Why People Wore Masks. While wearing a mask is an act of compliance with a regulation, committing a crime is deviant behaviour, constituting noncompliance with socially and culturally accepted norms and defying legal or regulatory sanctions.

The full post is at the link below: