Comment les entreprises préviennent-elles la fraude? Cas des banques.

Abstract

Numerous scandals happened in the corporate world. Some of them are now considered as textbook cases. They are used to teach students what already happened, how to deal with that, how to avoid that, and how to prevent those cases from happening. Even though those cases brought a lot to professionals on how to avoid those situations, it is still happening nowadays. There are a lot of different frauds happening in businesses. Frauds can occur in every company in different forms. Some are related to the business’ activities, and some can happen in every company. In order to fight against those frauds, companies must know about it and prevent it. This thesis gives explanations on how companies can prevent fraud from happening, and especially banks. In fact, this sector is much regulated and must respect many laws regarding risks management and internal organization. This is the reason why banks are at the heart of this research. In this regard, internal audit and internal control are two effective ways to prevent fraud from happening. One of them focuses on the risks that companies face and how to deal with them and the second one focuses on the company’s objectives to be reached. They are developed in this thesis through a literature review along with various fraud types. Indeed, a literature review has been made collecting and gathering information from the existing literature. Two main topics have been addressed in this review, namely: fraud and fraud prevention. In the second part, professionals from the banking sector have been interviewed since a qualitative study was conducted. With the help of a semi-structured questionnaire, they have had the opportunity to share with us their experience and opinion on the matter. All details collected have been put in parallel in order to get a full view on what is actually happening in practice. In the end, the theoretical information was partially compared to the empirical study. We have noticed that the literature is quite close to what is done in banks. Indeed, this was the area of focus. Internal audit and internal control are frequently, not to say always, used in banks in order to prevent risks such as fraud risk. Banks are well protected against risks they face. The development of such procedures to prevent fraud must be continuous and able to adapt to new situations not yet experienced mostly linked to digital progress.