Fraud in Accounting, Organizations and Society: Extending the Boundaries of Research

Abstract

This interdisciplinary review highlights the significant body of work on organizational wrongdoing, on governmental and societal corruption and illegality, and approaches that go beyond the two dominant areas of accounting and audit research on fraud, namely on fraud detection and prevention through auditing procedures and studies of the capital market effects of accounting frauds. We emphasize three themes: the importance of contextualizing fraud, the social construction of fraud and associated categories of wrongdoing (including the effects of such definitional work), and the recognition that fraud takes place in multiple domains, such as the individual, the firm, the organizational field and societies more generally. The papers in the special issue illustrate some of these themes, but they also enable us to identify areas of research that have yet to be examined in the accounting and auditing literature.

Keywords: fraud, corruption, white collar crime, fraud triangle, constructivism