Forensic Accounting and Financial Crimes: An Empirical Evidence from Operatives and Trainers of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, Academy, Nigeria

Abstract

Financial crimes in the public sector continue to be on the increase despite the effort of the Nigerian government in preventing the incidence of fraud and corruption through measures, such as establishing and strengthening organs of accountability and promoting the global best corporate practices. In view of this challenges, it become necessary to examines the effect of attributes of forensic accountants– Investigation of financial Crime and Corruption Skill (ICC), Knowledge and Expertise (KE), Litigation Support Services (LSS) on the financial crime (FC) in Nigerian public sector. The study employed cross-sectional design and a survey method. of the 110 questionnaires distributed, 53 questionnaires were returned valid and analysed. The study used PLS-SEM (SmartPLS 3.0) and IBM SPSS ver. 20.0 as the primary statistical analysis tools. The results of the study confirm that Knowledge and Expertise and Support Services of a forensic accountant has a significant positive effect on Financial Crime and it shows that investigation of crime and corruption has an insignificant negative effect on financial crime. Thus, the findings revealed that the forensic accountant attributes have significantly higher levels of KE, LSS on FC concerning fraud prevention, detection, management and response. Also, investigation of corruption discourages financial crime though not on high. The implication of this study might result in the overall reduction of fraud and fraudulent acts, promote institutional, regulatory and legal framework, and create awareness amongst the accounting and auditing institutions in the Nigerian public sector.