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Private Investigations of White‐Collar Crime Suspicions: A Qualitative Study of the Blame Game Hypothesis
Author(s) -
Gottschalk Petter
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
journal of investigative psychology and offender profiling
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.479
H-Index - 22
eISSN - 1544-4767
pISSN - 1544-4759
DOI - 10.1002/jip.1431
Subject(s) - blame , white collar crime , mandate , sample (material) , audit , psychology , deception , white (mutation) , criminology , social psychology , business , political science , accounting , law , biochemistry , chemistry , chromatography , gene
The activity of private investigations by fraud examiners is a business of lawyers, auditors, and other professionals who investigate suspicions of financial crime by white‐collar criminals. This paper presents results from an empirical study of investigation reports. The available sample consists of 28 reports written mostly by auditing firms such as Deloitte, Ernst & Young, and PwC. The blame game can occur at two stages in a private investigation. First, the mandate formulated by a client may point investigators in a specific direction. Next, investigators sometimes suffer from a tunnel view of predetermined opinions. In the sample of 28 investigations reports, more than half of them involve potential blame game victims. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.