Canada, Africa Rank Low, High on Fraud

Canada is least prone to business fraud while the nations of sub-Saharan Africa, India and China are some of the world’s riskiest, according to an international risk management firm survey, as reported in Bloomberg News.

Seventy-seven percent of companies in the study doing business in sub-Saharan African countries experienced some form of fraud, theft or corruption, down from 85 percent last year, according to a report from Kroll Advisory Solutions.

According to Bloomberg, only 47 percent of responding Canadian firms reported these difficulties.

Sixty percent of U.S. companies reported some experience with fraud, theft or corruption. Out of that, 26 percent involved theft, loss or attack upon information; 24 percent comprised physical asset theft; and 16 percent came from management conflicts of interest, the article reports.

Russia met the global survey average of 61 percent of companies reporting fraud and corruption, Bloomberg reports. 68 percent of Indian respondents reported some fraud, compared with 65 percent in China and Indonesia.

Fraud and theft in China fell 19 percent from last year, when a full 84 percent reported being affected by wrongdoing.

However, global concern about fraud is declining faster than the crimes themselves – Kroll Chief Executive Officer Tom Hartley noted in the Bloomberg article that companies are concerned when the event happens, then money is spent to stop that specific threat and the company moves on. He says that complacency is a huge issue: “You are more likely than not to be hit by fraud pretty much wherever you are in the world. Except Canada.”