Countering Fraud for Competitive Advantage: The Professional Approach to Reducing the Last Great Hidden Cost

8

Sanctioning Fraudsters and Pursuing Redress

8.1 INTRODUCTION

In many ways, when the stage of sanctions and redress has been reached, it is an illustration of failure, because clearly the best situation is to have prevented the fraud in the first place. However, as this book has shown, there is much fraud which does occur and when it does, it's important to get all or as much as possible of the money back, as well as to punish that fraudster. The latter is not just important from a moral perspective but also for the purposes of individual and general deterrence. For many lay observers, sanctions centre around the criminal justice system. However, this masks the fact that fraud can also be a civil tort. As will be shown in this chapter, the criminal approach is one of many other types of sanctions which can be used against fraudsters. These centre around disciplinary (where they are an employee), civil and regulatory sanctions too. Most importantly these can also be pursued in parallel. Ultimately, the victim has a choice to pursue a number of options, of which criminal sanctions are only one. This chapter will begin by examining the importance of deterrence, before moving on to examine the sanctions toolbox in more depth and the benefits and disadvantages of different approaches. Before this is considered, however, it is important to note that in criminological literature the most important factor in influencing criminals' decision-making is their likelihood of getting caught. ...