Defining Fraud: Issues for Organizations from an Information Systems Perspective

Fraud is one of the besetting evils of our time. While less dramatic than crimes of violence like murder or rape, fraud can inflict significant damage at organizational or individual level. Fraud is a concept that seems to have an obvious meaning until we try to define it. As fraud exists in many different guises, and it is necessary to carefully define what it is and to tailor policies and initiatives accordingly. Developing a definition of fraud is an early step of a prevention program. In order to be involved in the protection function, people at all levels of an organization must be knowledgeable about fraud. In this paper, we discuss the risk of fraud from an information systems perspective, explain what fraud is and present a range of definitions of fraud and computer fraud. We argue that without clearly defining fraud, organizations will not be able to share information that has the same meaning to everyone, to agree on how to measure the problem, and to know the extent of the problem, in order to decide how much and where to deploy resources to effectively solve it.