Managing Fraud Risk: A Practical Guide for Directors and Managers

Answers to the Quiz

Fraud Awareness Quiz – Question 4

What percentage (by value) of internal fraud is committed by women?

This is in many ways the most eye-catching question in the Quiz. Certainly, it is a question that always manages to stimulate much interest, discussion and debate because of its focus on gender, even though it is set in a fraud context. Of course I have deliberately phrased the question in this way to engage the attention of my delegates and sometimes this has backfired on me rather by distracting attention from more important messages I want to convey. As an example, I remember giving a talk on various aspects of financial crime at a conference for business leaders in the financial services sector in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago a number of years ago. During the course of this presentation I decided to take a chance and ask the audience this question, just to see what reaction it got. Well, the room was soon in uproar – everybody had a view on this and wanted to have their say. So after only a few minutes of discussion, I had to cut short the debate by answering the question myself in order that we could move onto the central message of the talk. However, if I thought that this was the end of the matter, then I was wrong. There were representatives of the Trinidad and Tobago press present at the conference and the next day newspapers in Port of Spain were reporting the whole conference under the banner headline: “Fraud Expert Says Men Commit More Fraud ...