Boiling the Frog Slowly: The Immersion of C-Suite Financial Executives into Fraud

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

7-27-2018

Publication Title

Journal of Business Ethics

First page number:

1

Last page number:

29

Abstract

This study explores how financial executives retrospectively account for their crossing the line into financial statement fraud while acting within or reacting to a financialized corporate environment. We conduct our investigation through face-to-face interviews with 13 former C-suite financial executives who were involved in and indicted for major cases of accounting fraud. Five different themes of accounts emerged from the narratives, characterizing executives’ fraud immersion as a meaning-making process by which the particulars of the proximal social context (the influence of social actors and contextual characteristics) and individual motivations collectively molded executives’ vocabularies of fraud immersion. Our executives’ narratives portray their fraud entanglement as typically occurring in small, incremental steps. Their accounts expand our understanding of the influence of socialization on executive-level financial fraud beyond the individualized focus of the fraud triangle model.

Keywords

Financial statement fraud; Incrementalism; Slippery slope; Socialization

Disciplines

Accounting

Language

English

UNLV article access

Search your library

Share

COinS