Fear Of Detection Research Articles

Unveiling the Motivations Behind Malaysian Taxpayer Participation in Voluntary Disclosure Programme

In the pursuit of enhanced tax compliance, voluntary disclosure programmes (VDP) serve as valuable tools when executed effectively. This study delves into tax professionals’ perspectives on factors influencing taxpayer participation in Malaysia’s VDP when first introduced in 2015 to boost revenue and compliance. This survey of 135 tax practitioners from prominent firms in Johor Bahru and Kuala Lumpur sheds light on critical VDP participation drivers. The findings indicate that the VDP’s success hinges on several factors. Foremost among these is the size of penalty reduction, which holds the greatest sway in motivating participation. Following closely is the apprehension of further audits, while fear of detection and punishment ranks third. The efforts made by the Inland Revenue Board of Malaysia in promoting the VDP emerge as the fourth significant driver. This study, among the first to explore VDP implementation in Malaysia, anticipates inspiring future research and policy refinements in the realm of tax compliance.

A Tax Morale Approach to Compliance: Recommendations for the IRS

This article appeared in the December 31, 2007 Annual Report to Congress of the National Taxpayer Advocate, which commissioned this research. Why do people follow the law? The answer, under the traditional theory of compliance, is fear of detection and punishment. The deterrence model, however, accounts for only a minor portion of actual compliance levels. It has such poor explanatory power because it assumes that the decision to comply is based solely on a rational cost-benefit analysis in which people weigh the benefits of non-compliance against the costs of detection and penalties. Recent literature reveals, however, that the decision to comply is not purely rational. Rather, personal values, social norms, and non-rational cognitive processes also strongly affect the decision. What holds true for law in general holds true for tax compliance specifically. Traditional methods of enforcement through audit and penalties explain only a small fraction of voluntary tax compliance. Theorists and researchers attribute the vast majority of compliance to what they loosely describe as internal motivations or “tax morale.” The field is still young, the subject complex, and some of the empirical data is inconclusive. Nevertheless, the literature clearly indicates that tax morale plays a major role in tax compliance.Although neither the exact components of tax morale nor the precise mechanisms by which they work have yet been fully delineated the literature has identified certain elements. Research shows that tax compliance is affected by (social and personal) norms such as those regarding procedural justice, trust, belief in the legitimacy of the government, reciprocity, altruism, and identification with the group. Cognitive processes, such as prospect theory, also influence an individual’s reaction to tax issues. Studies also indicate that certain demographic factors such as age, gender and education correlate with the tax morale.The components of tax morale, like internal motivators in other areas of the law, are not static. They interact with each other and the environment and are influenced by each individual’s own cognitive framework. Consequently, an external agent, such as the IRS, can influence tax morale norms and thereby tax compliance. It can activate compliance norms in a variety of ways including education, properly framing communications, fair procedures, and a regulatory framework that incorporates current and future findings of tax morale research into its operations and dealings with taxpayers.The Report makes three major recommendations. First, the IRS should establish a department devoted solely to exploring tax morale issues and implementing the findings. Second, the IRS should adopt a tax morale approach to tax compliance that recognizes the importance of taxpayers’ internal motivations and the effects on these motivations of societal conditions and institutions (such as the IRS) that interact with them. Third, using behavioral science research, the IRS should implement ongoing educational (long term and short term) programs and media campaigns. Since the subject of this Report is tax compliance of individual taxpayers, both the literature review and the recommendations focus on individuals. Both the tax morale concept and this Report, however, are relevant for all taxpayers.

Fear of Detection and Efficacy of Prevention: Using Construal Level to Encourage Health Behaviors

This research examines the psychological processes and factors that shape illness-detection versus illness-prevention health actions. Four experiments using contexts of mental health, skin cancer, and breast cancer show that illness detection evokes fear, which undermines engagement in detection behaviors. Considering detection at low (vs. high) levels of thought reduced fear and increased health persuasion. Illness prevention is driven by self-efficacy perceptions and considering prevention at high (vs. low) levels of thought increases persuasion. In further evidence of process, trait fear moderated the detection effects, and dispositional self-efficacy moderated the prevention effects. As an intervention, framing a detection action as serving illness-prevention goals increased people’s likelihood of engaging with an online breast cancer detection tool. These findings illuminate the psychology of detection as being distinct from the psychology of prevention, identify the role of fear in the consideration of health behaviors, and show contexts in which construal levels have divergent effects on health persuasion.

Is this the end for ‘encro’ phones?

Encrypted, or ‘encro’, phones are the communication method of choice for organised crime groups (OCGs) across the UK and Europe. Until 2020, the encro was seen as a completely secure and anonymous way of organised criminal groups contacting each other without fear of detection or tracing. However, the apparent ‘hack’ of one encro phone operator and the compromise of a number of devices, followed by multiple arrests, suggest that the previously airtight encro phones are not as reliable as users once thought, explains Catherine O’Rourke at JMW. Encrypted phones, or ‘encro’ phones, are the communication method of choice for organised crime groups (OCGs) across the UK and Europe, because of their apparent entirely secure features. Encro phones were originally designed for military use, but more recently, they have been associated with celebrities wishing to secure their privacy, and for criminal activity.

Monitoring Enterprise DNS Queries for Detecting Data Exfiltration From Internal Hosts

Enterprise networks constantly face the threat of valuable and sensitive data being stolen by cyber-attackers. Sophisticated attackers are increasingly exploiting the Domain Name System (DNS) service for exfiltrating data as well as maintaining tunneled command and control communications for malware. This is because DNS traffic is usually allowed to pass through enterprise firewalls without deep inspection or state maintenance, thereby providing a covert channel for attackers to encode low volumes of data without fear of detection. This paper develops and evaluates a real-time mechanism for detecting exfiltration and tunneling of data over DNS. Unlike prior solutions that operate off-line or in the network core, ours works in real-time at the enterprise edge. Our first contribution is to collect and analyze real DNS traffic from two organizations (a large University and a mid-sized Government Research Institute) over several days and extract numerous stateless attributes of DNS messages that can distinguish malicious from legitimate queries. Our second contribution is to develop, tune, and train a machine-learning algorithm to detect anomalies in DNS queries using a benign dataset of top rank primary domains. To achieve this, we have used 14 days-worth of DNS traffic from each organization. For our third contribution, we implement our scheme on live 10 Gbps traffic streams from the network borders of the two organizations, inject more than three million malicious DNS queries generated by two exfiltration tools, and show that our solution can identify them with high accuracy. We compare our solution with the two-class classifier used in prior work. We draw insights into anomalous DNS queries of two enterprise networks by their anomaly scores, the trace of query count over time, enterprise hosts querying them, and TTL and Type fields of their corresponding responses. Our tools and datasets are made available to the public for validation and further research.

Reflecting Yourself? The Influence of Mirrors and Avatars on Dishonest Behavior in Virtual Reality

Objective self-awareness theory (Duval & Wicklund, 1972) predicts that individuals behave morally compliant and honest under increased self-awareness. We argue that this proposition requires a critical reflection in the context of Virtual Reality (VR). The present thesis investigates self-awareness and dishonesty in VR and is among the first to provide such an exploratory reflection. In an experiment, we tested the effects of the two factors (1) mirror presence and (2) avatar choice on dishonesty in a highly-immersive VR setting. Participants played a mind game in VR that incentivized dishonest reporting without any fear of detection. We let participants choose between two human and one fictitious avatar. We also varied the presence of a mirror across participants. Our results show that participants took significantly more time to lie when facing a mirror or wearing a human avatar, indicating a higher state of self-awareness. However, this effect did not significantly influence the resulting level of dishonesty. We discuss a number of factors that could explain this finding and highlight the relevance of further research in the economics domain.

Psycho-social factors associated with maternal neonaticide

Current research presents five case studies of maternal neonaticide in Georgia. Participants were under the age of thirty, with incomplete secondary education, unemployed, dependent on their families’ low income, living in the rural areas of Georgia. In three cases, participants resided with their family of origin. They were not married or in a relationship with the father of the child. They described their families and communities as conservative, holding strong cultural/religious beliefs against premarital sexual relations/childbirth out of wedlock. They lacked problem solving and coping skills, avoided making decisions concerning the pregnancy by concealing it. This being their first pregnancy, they gave birth alone followed by panic and fear of detection, committed neonaticide and hid the body of the infant. None of them had a prior criminal record. In the remaining cases, participants were married, lived with their spouses and children, had financial hardships. Both reported psychological and physical abuse from their spouses. One of them had a prior criminal offense for possessing controlled substances. The motive for neonaticide was an unwanted child due to an extramarital affair and threat of financial abandonment from extended family. In both cases, infants suffered fatal injuries. All participants reported lack of social support and emotional neglect from family members. These results are in line with international research, suggesting that certain patterns among these mothers are shared. Psychosocial factors associated with neonaticide should be utilized in the process of planning and implementing preventive strategies in health, social and legal frameworks.Disclosure of interestThe author has not supplied his/her declaration of competing interest.

Web-based child pornography: The global impact of deterrence efforts and its consumption on mobile platforms

Our study is the first to look at mobile device use for child sexual exploitation material (CSEM) consumption, and at the global impact of deterrence efforts by search providers. We used data from Google, Bing, and Yandex to assess how web searches for CSEM are being conducted, both at present and historically. Our findings show that the blocking efforts by Google and Microsoft have resulted in a 67% drop in the past year in web-based searches for CSEM. Additionally, our findings show that mobile devices are a substantial platform for web-based consumption of CSEM, with tablets and smartphones representing 32% of all queries associated with CSEM conducted on Bing. Further, our findings show that a major search engine not located in the United States, Yandex, did not undertake blocking efforts similar to those implemented by Google and Microsoft and has seen no commensurate drop in CSEM searches and continues to profit from ad revenue on these queries. While the efforts by Google and Microsoft have had a deterrence effect in the United States, searchers from Russia and other locations where child pornography possession is not criminalized have continued to use these services. Additionally, the same lax enforcement environment has allowed searchers from the United States to utilize Yandex with little fear of detection or referral to United States law enforcement from the Russian authorities.

Emerging threats: financial crime in the virtual world

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to highlight emerging threats in cyberspace, with particular reference to financial crime in the virtual world, which have real life implications, as well as to recommend ways in which the threat may be mitigated.Design/methodology/approach – The methodology adopted consisted of an extensive literature review on topics to include cyber crime, virtual worlds, and financial crime.Findings – Virtual worlds such as Second Life play a key role in supporting real world activities such as education, training and business and as such, should not be dismissed purely as a “gaming” environment. In addition, emerging technologies coupled with the lack of legislation and regulation within virtual worlds has created an environment where a variety of crimes can be committed without fear of detection or prosecution. A further concern is its use by criminals as a vehicle to mask real life crimes such as fraud, identify theft and money laundering. The question is to what extent the bl...

Creating Global Alliance for Effective Mechanism Against Cartels

The term “cartel” refers to the worst kind of such communication, as it deals with the creation of agreements to fix prices of goods and services at an artificially high level. Cartels are universally established as being the most pernicious form of agreement for competition regulators. The OECD refers to them as “the most egregious violations of competition law,” and has repeatedly found that one of the most important goals of Competition Policy must be to root out cartels. The European Union has repeatedly stated the harms caused by them in terms of reducing consumer welfare and distorting allocative efficiency. Small number of firms in an industry, high concentration, barriers to entry, low technological advancement, homogeneous product, strong ability of competing firms to exchange information on price and other terms of sale, uniformity in cost or efficiency, severe punishment which can be inflicted on the cheater, and effective trade association etc. make it conducive for firms to cartelize and to continue as such on a long term basis. The less fear of detection and punishment also encourages firms to cartelize.

Understanding informal payments in health care: motivation of health workers in Tanzania

BackgroundThere is growing evidence that informal payments for health care are fairly common in many low- and middle-income countries. Informal payments are reported to have a negative consequence on equity and quality of care; it has been suggested, however, that they may contribute to health worker motivation and retention. Given the significance of motivation and retention issues in human resources for health, a better understanding of the relationships between the two phenomena is needed. This study attempts to assess whether and in what ways informal payments occur in Kibaha, Tanzania. Moreover, it aims to assess how informal earnings might help boost health worker motivation and retention.MethodsNine focus groups were conducted in three health facilities of different levels in the health system. In total, 64 health workers participated in the focus group discussions (81% female, 19% male) and where possible, focus groups were divided by cadre. All data were processed and analysed by means of the NVivo software package.ResultsThe use of informal payments in the study area was confirmed by this study. Furthermore, a negative relationship between informal payments and job satisfaction and better motivation is suggested. Participants mentioned that they felt enslaved by patients as a result of being bribed and this resulted in loss of self-esteem. Furthermore, fear of detection was a main demotivating factor. These factors seem to counterbalance the positive effect of financial incentives. Moreover, informal payments were not found to be related to retention of health workers in the public health system. Other factors such as job security seemed to be more relevant for retention.ConclusionThis study suggests that the practice of informal payments contributes to the general demotivation of health workers and negatively affects access to health care services and quality of the health system. Policy action is needed that not only provides better financial incentives for individuals but also tackles an environment in which corruption is endemic.

Implications for Case Management

Immigrants are an integral part of the history and diversity of the United States. Now more than ever, this growing population is facing a major challenge related to the widening gap in overall healthcare access and health insurance coverage. This gap raises concerns related to access, economics, fear of detection, and cultural/language barriers to care, which extend beyond the individual person to affect the community at large. This is particularly true for those immigrants who are residing in this country illegally. Healthcare providers, in general and hospitals in particular, face many challenges in providing care to this group. As the immigrant population continues to grow, the case management community will face an ongoing challenge to expand and refine its knowledge base and incorporate key competencies into its practice patterns in order to ensure access to and delivery of healthcare to this largely underserved group. This article specifically addresses the undocumented population, and identifies opportunities to encourage and promote access to healthcare while providing effective care management interventions.

Coalitions of reciprocity and the maintenance of financial integrity within informal value transmission systems: The operational dynamics of contemporary hawala networks

On a global scale, the estimated flow of migrant workers' remittances through formal channels now comfortably exceeds $100bn per annum, while the unrecorded flow through informal channels amounts to at least as much again. During the last few years the Informal Value Transmission Systems (IVTS) networks through which the latter are transferred have attracted a great deal of attention, both because of a gradual realisation of their scale, and because of fears that they could provide a vehicle for drug smugglers and terrorists to shift funds without fear of detection by the authorities. Recently reinforced anti-money laundering (AML/CFT) regulations aimed at curbing such illegitimate transfers are having an expensive impact on all sections of the financial services industry, no less in the formal than the informal sector. As yet, however, remarkably little attention has been paid to the basis on which the so-called‘underground’networks in the informal sector actually operate, the basis on which they organise and guarantee the security of their financial operations, let alone the extent to which they may have developed their own internal mechanisms for keeping drug smugglers and terrorist financiers at bay. In the same vein there is little awareness of the extent to which these‘informal’networks now use sophisticated communications technology, including Swift and telegraphic transfer (TT), to implement their transactions, and the extent to which the financial liquidity generated by remittances now plays a key role in supporting commercial counter-trade. Based on first-hand observations of the activities of Anglo-Pakistani hawala networks, this paper presents an empirically informed account of the operation of IVTS as highly efficient financial systems, and on this basis explores whether recently reinforced AML/CFT initiatives are fit for their purpose.

Drugs and the college athlete: an analysis of the attitudes of student athletes at risk.

Theories related to planned behavior and reasoned action have included an individual's attitude as an important factor in the formation of behavioral intentions and behaviors. Research on this topic suggests that salient beliefs affect intentions and subsequent behaviors, either through attitudes or subjective norms, or the degree of (perceived) control that an individual feels he/she has over the behavior. This study was designed to examine the relative importance of selected attitude variables in describing a profile of athletes who were at risk for using anabolic steroids, human grown hormone, amphetamines, cocaine, and marijuana. Responses from 563 student athletes at two Division One NCAA universities were used in the study. The results of this study suggest that subjective norms, based on the influence of drug testing, peer influence, and a fear of detection are significant factors that influence the decisions of student athletes related to using banned substances. In this article characteristics of at-risk athletes are presented with recommendations for drug education programs for student athletes.

Brazilians and the 1990 United States Census: Immigrants, Ethnicity, and the Undercount

Two issues involved in the conduct of the 1990 United States census and its problematic final tally are the ethnic categories that were utilized and the enumeration of undocumented immigrants. The experience of Brazilian immigrants in New York City highlights these issues. The census categories hampered the ability of Brazilians to declare their ethnicity, a failing that almost certainly led to an undercount of this segment of the immigrant population. A significant but unknown percentage of Brazilian immigrants are undocumented. Factors that make it difficult to enumerate undocumented populations, including disinterest in the entire census enterprise and fear of detection by immigration authorities, also were responsible for the non-participation of many Brazilians in the 1990 census and for their subsequent undercount.

Surveying the intersection: pathology, secrecy, and the discourses of racial and sexual identity.

"Surveying the Intersection: Pathology, Secrecy, and the Discourses of Racial and Sexual Identity" cautions against the risks of metaphorical imperialism in readings of codified gay and lesbian representation. Taking issue with Foucault's suggestion that the secret of the nineteenth century was the secret of sex, I suggest that, in nineteenth-century American culture, where African-American identity and equality were among the most controversial issues of the century, the secrets of identity were secrets of race as well. Because scientific and literary representations of pathological and/or secret, essential identities are sites of intersection in the discourses of homosexual and mixed-race identity, they should be investigated as intersections, rather than read as codifications of sexual difference. Surveying the discourses of scientific racism, genetics, and eugenics, and doing readings of Frances E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy and Alice Dunbar-Nelson's "The Stones of the Village," I suggest that Harper's representation of the mulatto leader can be read as an act of resistance to the representation of the mulatto as a degenerate, hybrid species; and that in Dunbar-Nelson's story, the thematics of passing, secrecy, and the fear of detection, while having a recognizably homoerotic quality, should not be read simply as a codification of homosexual difference and panic. I conclude with a call for more work on historicizing the intersection of racial and sexual identity in the discourses of pathology and degeneration.

Doing the Right Thing: How Social Security Claimants View Compliance

Since 1986, the Australian Department of Social Security has increasingly stressed client compliance. Attitudes toward several compliance requirements were assessed through interviews with 196 clients. While most were satisfied with social security and found staff to be helpful, nearly one- third (30.1 per cent) expressed dissatisfaction citing payment delays, long queues, rude treatment, lost documents and inaccurate information. There was considerable acceptance of eligibility review procedures which, for some, served to assuage feelings of shame at being 'on the dole'. Most respondents (74.3 per cent) said unequivocally they would report income for reasons of honesty, fairness to others, or fear of detection. Others would not report small amounts of casual earnings, justifying their non-compliance on grounds that payments failed to meet basic subsistence needs, or that income-reporting would unfairly disrupt payments. The findings suggest that client perceptions of fairness reinforce voluntary compliance.

Security auditing - fear of detection -vs- fear of detecting

It's amazing how far technology has come since the invention of the Frankenstein monster. Not long ago I read about a prototype of a new kind of secure personal computer (PC). This machine was so secure that, for one user, it could generate 135 million bytes of audit data per day. My first reaction on reading this was to think that any actual information hidden in that audit data would certainly be secure.

Violation of Privacy Norms: A Variation of the Lost-Letter Technique

The privacy norm was studied using a variant of the lost-letter technique. Specifically, the effect of a simple assertion of confidentiality on the salience of the norm was investigated. 60 stamped, unsealed envelopes were “lost” to provide finders with an opportunity to violate or sustain privacy without fear of detection. Half of the envelopes were scamped confidential; the other half were not. The confidentiality marking did not affect frequency or speed of return or tendency toward invasion of privacy.

Another Look at Maslow's Motivational Hierarchy

Maslow's (1954) original work with a motivational hierarchy suggests that for any given organism motives exist according to an order or rank. Maslow proposed a five-level motivational ' hierarchy : the physiological aspects, followed by safety needs, love and belonging, self-esteem, and self-actualization. Individuals have their own motivational scares which determine the person's progress in the sequential hierarchy. If each motive is satisfied, the individual is said to be satisfied, but this is rarely a prolonged state. Initially, Maslow was concerned with a strict order in the satisfaction of man's needs for 'food, security, having friends, achieving status, and realizing one's potential. While the needs may be universal, present-day application indicates that levels in the hierarchy may be ignored to achieve what the individual considers a more important goal. Subjects (N = 100) between the ages 17 and 21 yr. were selected from psychology classes to participate in a study of values of youth. Fifry-two were women and 48 were men. All were from middle-class homes. The questionnaires were completed in class; students were required to check reasons for the possible use of marijuana, hard drugs, alcohol, engaging in rebellious am, and premarital sex. Reasons included curiosiry, peer pressure, rebellion against parents, and personal preference. Subjects could also indicate whether the risk of danger (Maslow's safery), peer pressure (Maslow's need to belong), or fear of detection (Maslow's selfesteem) would be involved in making their decision. Forty percent of the women and 50% of the men indicated that peer pressure was the reason for their initial use of marijuana. Interestingly, 70% of the women gave the same reason for the use of alcohol as did 52% of the men. Fewer than 10% of the women and 4% of the men indicated fear of physiological danger. Sixteen percent of the women and 20% of the men indicated that curiosity was a reason for the possible experimentation with drugs, but fear of side effects was relatively strong. The fear of parental detection of premarital sex was higher for women (22%) than men (4%). but one-fourth of the females and one-third of the males considered sex to be part of dating. It is hoped that these indications of a new 'morality' can be studied in future research.