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This study aims to increase awareness and educate the reader about health-care fraud targeting seniors in the USA to help stakeholders better understand, recognize and prevent this type of fraud.

This paper collects statistics on the current state of health care frauds committed against seniors, and examines related cases and laws.

The authors find this type of fraud is highly prevalent and expected to increase. Current laws preventing this fraud from occurring are multifold and complex. While prevention strategies through law enforcement have been somewhat successful, a reduction in resources may put seniors at an increased risk in the years to come.

Without additional prevention strategies, the problem will likely escalate with a growing population of older adults. This study encourages further research into effective prevention strategies and methods to fight health-care fraud against seniors.

Health-care fraud and its associated costs pose a significant threat to the society and economy of the USA. Reducing this fraud will not only reduce the costs to the US economy but also improve the physical and mental well-being of senior victims, reduce their mortality and hospitalization rates and improve the public trust placed to health-care providers.

This study highlights how health-care fraud is committed against seniors. With the projected trend of an aging US population, educating stakeholders, increasing awareness and applying tools to protect seniors will be important to reduce the absolute scope of this problem in the future.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss financial fraud and exploitation against seniors relating to wills, trusts and guardianship. The paper describes how this fraud affects its victims, points out red flags and makes recommendations that may help control this pervasive type of fraud.

Information from a range of different sources, such as journal publications, law textbooks, law enforcement websites and estate planning cases are used as a basis to provide information about how fraudsters are committing this type of fraud, which red flags to watch out for and how to prevent this fraud from occurring.

Fraud relating to wills, trusts and guardianship is oftentimes difficult to detect and continues to be a grave threat to its victims. While this fraud will likely never be eradicated, specific efforts have been put into place to track financial exploitation. Further steps presented in this paper can be deployed to help rein in these fraud schemes.

The paper provides useful information about frauds related to wills, trusts and guardianship for stakeholders. This includes, but is not limited to, anyone whose work is related to seniors, such as accountants, lawyers, regulators, bankers, financial planners, law enforcement personnel, academics, medical professionals, caregivers, family members and ethicists. These stakeholders can use this information to help combat this fraud and prevent not only financial losses of seniors but physical harm as well.

Decreasing financial exploitation of seniors will not only improve their financial position and may reduce their reliance on Medicaid but will also improve their mental and physical well-being and save lives.

Research in the area of maltreatment and exploitation of older adults is still in its early stages, as knowledge of effective prevention, intervention and remediation practices are limited. This paper adds to the research in this arena by drawing on a unique set of resources that shed light on financial fraud commonly committed against seniors. This study also makes much needed recommendations that are aimed to prevent this threat related to wills, trusts and guardianship.

This paper aims to analyze drug counterfeiting, explains its risk factors and operating and legal environments reviews recent legal cases and develops a multi-stakeholder prevention strategy that includes forensic accounting methods.

This is a theoretical study based on legal case studies and the best forensic accounting strategies.

Pharmaceutical drug counterfeiting is a fast-growing fraud that so far has attracted little attention from forensic accountants. A recent estimate projects that criminals collect around $75bn annually in illicit sales from counterfeit drugs (Bairu, 2015). Pharmaceutical counterfeiting also leads to the loss of lives when criminals use lethal chemicals in the manufacturing of fake medicines (Liang, 2006a; Brown, 2005). Because the detection of drug counterfeiting is extremely difficult after fake medicines have been ingested by patients, the strategy developed in this paper is based on early discovery by using reliable tracking technologies and inventory management controls in the supply chain, conducting effective regulatory and legitimate customs inspections, and increasing consumer awareness of basic forensic accounting tools.

This paper extends previous research by integrating various factors into a single multi-stakeholder prevention framework.

The paper presents a synthesized, comprehensive view of the drug fraud epidemic and analyzes concrete steps that can be taken to protect the pharmaceutical supply chain to reduce the loss of lives and monetary injuries.

No previous research has analyzed this issue from a multi-stakeholder point of view and used forensic accounting tools to complement a prevention strategy. The drug counterfeiting prevention strategy developed in this paper addresses the supply side, the regulatory enforcement side and the demand side.

The purpose of this paper is to review the use and application of shell entities, as they facilitate crime and terrorism, impede investigations and harm societies.

The study details the types and characteristics of shell entities, reviews actual cases to exhibit how shells are abused, outlines reasons shells disguise beneficial ownership and analyzes steps taken by countries and organizations to thwart the abuse of shell entities.

Many types of shell entities are used by white-collar criminals and are often layered in an intricate network which conceals the identity of beneficial owners. Nominees and bearer shares are used in tandem with shell entities to optimize concealment. Accountants, lawyers and trust and company service providers facilitate and promote the use and abuse of shell entities by lawbreakers. The G-8, Financial Action Task Force and G-20 have begun steps to improve ownership transparency, but the effort is moving at a modest pace.

The analysis makes clear the reasons for and means by which the wealthy and powerful, along with criminals, conceal trillions of dollars of income and wealth that remain untaxed and may be used for nefarious purposes. The paper is limited by the paucity of data on concealed assets and their beneficial owners.

The findings clearly show the need for more concerted action by national governments, organizations, the United Nations and law enforcement and to improve ownership transparency and information exchange regarding shell entities.

The findings demonstrate that shell entities used to conceal wealth prevent untold trillions in taxes from being collected by governments worldwide. This lack of revenue facilitates income inequality and skews national economic and fiscal policies. Also, more white-collar criminals and terrorist financiers could be brought to justice if ownership transparency is improved.

This study adds to the limited literature on shell entities, their characteristics and uses and abuses.

Examines the legal environment of the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the USA with respect to auditor liability. Provides an understanding of the legal risks to accountants associated with third‐party uses of audited financial statements by contrasting accounting liability for negligent misrepresentation in various US settings with those of the four other nations. Liability pressure has been very acute and litigation in the five countries has increased. Evidence supports a trend towards limiting third‐party liability to accountants.

Discusses an organisation’s responsibilities to mitigate the opportunity for identity theft, which is the criminal act of assuming the identity of another person with the expectation of gain; it is becoming the most pervasive financial crime today and resulted in the estimated loss of $221 billion worldwide in 2003. Indicates the methods used to steal identities and some of the US laws applicable to identity theft. Goes on to the increasing tendency among victims of identity theft to seek redress from third parties, including employers and other record keepers, for failing to protect their personal information. Makes recommendations for organisations to reduce the risks involved: enhance manual controls by destroying outdated records and restricting files to authorised employees, establish employee controls, enhance computer system controls, and consider insurance as a risk management tool.

The most recent IRS estimate puts the individual tax gap at $245 billion per year. This study seeks to develop and review performance measures for the seven most important IRS programs aimed at reducing the tax gap.

The study develops and analyzes performance measures for the last ten years. The performance measures include discovery rates, penalty rates, penalty dollars, abatement rates, abatement dollars, collection activity rates, and criminal enforcement activities (number of special agents, investigations, referrals, indictments, sentences, and length of sentences).

The results are mixed regarding changes in performance measures. There was almost no change in audit rates and increases in other IRS discovery programs. There was a steady decrease in civil penalties for the first seven years followed by increases in latest three years. There were decreases in abatements for most penalties, a dramatic decrease in seizures, and significant increases in liens and levies. There were noteworthy decreases in the number of special agents and criminal investigations. The relatively small number of criminal investigation activities is surprising given the amount of the tax gap.

This study examines all major programs aimed at the individual tax gap.

The purpose of this study is to examine the extent to which accountants, internal auditors, and certified fraud examiners use fraud prevention and detection methods, and their perceptions regarding the effectiveness of these methods.

A survey was administered to 86 accountants, internal auditors and certified fraud examiners.

The results indicate that firewalls, virus and password protection, and internal control review and improvement are quite commonly used to combat fraud. However, discovery sampling, data mining, forensic accountants, and digital analysis software are not often used, despite receiving high ratings of effectiveness. In particular, organizational use of forensic accountants and digital analysis were the least often used of any anti‐fraud method but had the highest mean effectiveness ratings. The lack of use of these highly effective methods may be driven by lack of firm resources.

Organizations should consider the cost/benefit tradeoff in investing in highly effective but potentially underutilized methods to prevent or detect fraud. While the costs may seem prohibitive for small organizations, substantial cost savings from reduced fraud losses may also be significant.

By identifying methods that work well for fraud detection and prevention, prescriptive information can be provided to accounting practitioners, internal auditors, and fraud examiners.

Recent research has examined the effect of the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, more commonly known as the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (GLB), on the market value of U.S. commercial banks, life insurers, property-liability insurers, thrifts, finance companies, and securities firms. This study fills a gap in our understanding of the Act by measuring the price and trading volume effects of the GLB on U.S.-listed foreign banks. A primary contribution of this study is to examine the role, if any, of two corporate governance perspectives, the stakeholder (code law), and shareholder (common law) models, in a cross-sectional analysis of foreign bank market reaction to the GLB.

Using a generalized least squares (GLS) portfolio approach, Corrado's rank statistic, and confirmed by the traditional market model approach, we find significant negative share price reactions to certain legislative announcements surrounding the passage of the GLB. Trading volume reactions corroborate the significant share price responses. In general, our results indicate that investors in foreign banks reacted negatively to key legislative action. In a cross-sectional analysis, younger, higher-risk foreign banks with less concentrated ownership and more subordinated debt from countries with higher quality accounting standards appear to have more positive (or less negative) share price reactions.