Page 446 - ACFE Fraud Reports 2009_2020

Position of Perpetrator Based on Region
Figure 43 shows the distribution of fraudsters based on their level of authority and sorted by geographical region.
These distributions most likely do not represent any regional fraud trends; they simply reflect the particular cases
that were reported by our members in each region. Consequently, this should not be interpreted to mean, for
example, that an Eastern European organization is more likely to be victimized by an owner/executive than a sim-
ilarly situated company in another region, or that a company in the Asia-Pacific region faces a higher risk of fraud
by a manager than companies in other regions. But the data does give context to the other regional data in this
report — helping us understand more about the makeup of the perpetrators in each set of cases.

Figure 43: Position of Perpetrator Based on Region

4.3%
United States
(626 Cases) 46.5% 31.9% 17.3%
3.0%
Sub-Saharan Africa 40.8% 43.8% 12.4%
(169 Cases)
Asia-Pacific
(123 Cases) 26.8% 52.0% 21.1%
3.2%
Western Europe 44.7% 29.8% 22.3%
(94 Cases)
1.4%
Eastern Europe and 32.9% 32.9% 32.9%
Western/Central Asia
REGION (73 Cases) 3.6%
Canada
(55 Cases) 52.7% 21.8% 21.8%
1.9%
Latin America and
the Caribbean 39.6% 39.6% 18.9%
(53 Cases)
Southern Asia 34.0% 47.2% 18.9%
(53 Cases) Employee
3.8%
Middle East and Manager
North Africa 30.8% 46.2% 19.2% Owner/Executive
(52 Cases)
Other
0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%
PERCENT OF CASES

Figures 44-52 show the median loss of cases in each region based on the fraudster’s position. For the most part, we
found that higher losses were associated with higher levels of authority. In a few regions there was some variation
to this trend (for example, in Canada, frauds committed by managers were more costly than frauds committed by
owners/executives), but those discrepancies occurred in regions that had a small sample size of cases, meaning the
data is less reliable for extrapolating true trends. Overall, position still exhibits a strong correlation with fraud cost.

42 REPORT TO THE NATIONS ON OCCUPATIONAL FRAUD AND ABUSE