This year’s report illustrates how economic crime has evolved over the last two years, morphing into different forms depending on industrial sector and region.
Despite this evolving threat, we have seen a decrease in the detection of criminal activity by methods within management’s control, with detection through corporate controls down by 7%. What’s more, one in five organisations (22%) have not carried out a single fraud risk assessment in the last 24 months. When looked at in the context of the findings in PwC’s 19th Annual Global CEO Survey – where two-thirds of chief executives agreed that there are more threats to the growth of their company than ever before (a sharp increase, compared to 59% in 2015) – this points to a potentially worrying trend: that too much is being left to chance. In fact, our findings indicate that one in ten economic crimes are discovered by accident.