Ethical dilemma: A pathway to fraud or not?

Abstract

Financial fraud committed by employees is a phenomenon that has been present in business and professional circles for a long time, however, with the advent of increasingly sophisticated techniques for doing so, the real challenge is how to prevent fraud. The main aim of the research is that when the opportunity arises to commit financial fraud, ethical principles and codes of conduct go beyond the personal and collective motives of employees. Furthermore, we try to confirm that constant training of employees on the topic of the code of ethics reduces the possibility of financial fraud in the company. To support research questions, we conducted a survey. The respondents were employees engaged in various types of jobs in the Accounting, Finance, and Auditing sector as well as students from the Accounting and Auditing program in Serbian domestic public faculties and universities. The period of the research was April-May 2021. The research results showed that almost 50% of respondents never get training in the area of code of ethics application in real-life cases, and 20-30% remain undecided on each ethical dilemma presented in the questionnaire, therefore confirming our hypothesis that there is a much room to implement ethical training as the most important prevention technique for fraud in Serbian companies.