National Culture and Occupational Fraud Magnitude: The Moderating Role of Fraud Type

ABSTRACT This study investigates the relationship between national culture and the magnitude of occupational fraud. Guided by national culture theory and economic theory of crime, we propose that a country's culture, as measured by Hofstede's six national culture dimensions—power distance, individualism, achievement orientation, uncertainty avoidance, long-term orientation, and indulgence—is related to the magnitude of occupational fraud. Further, we propose that the type of fraud moderates this relationship. We test these effects using a two-level model on a dataset of 2,898 occupational fraud cases across 41 countries. We find that uncertainty avoidance and long-term orientation display significant positive associations with occupational fraud magnitude (while power distance and achievement orientation display marginally significant positive associations). Further, the effects of achievement orientation, uncertainty avoidance, and indulgence are moderated by fraud type (while power distance and long-term orientation show marginally significant interaction effects).