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Two-thirds of New Zealand businesses have reported economic crimes such as theft or embezzlement over the past two years, a rate which outstrips the average for both the Asia Pacific region and the world, PricewaterhouseCoopers says.
The accounting and advisory firm's biennial Global Economic Crime Survey showed 66.7 per cent of the 78 New Zealand companies and firms which took part had suffered an economic crime in the past two years.
The global average was 42.7 per cent and the Asia Pacific average was 39.1 per cent.
PWC partner John Fisk believed New Zealand's relatively high rate of reported economic crime was because of several factors.
"We are more open about talking about it, I also think we have some pretty good systems for detecting it," he said.
"On the other hand there's a lot of New Zealand businesses that are pretty trusting and that opens them up to the potential for fraud as well."
The survey found total losses suffered by New Zealand respondents over the past two years was $69.54 million.
But PWC said it was "alarming" that 20 per cent of those New Zealand organisations that reported an incidence of economic crime suffered losses of between $1.35 million and $13.5 million.
"Asset misappropriation", or simply put - thieving - was the most prevalent form of economic crime, accounting for 32 per cent of reported incidents, closely followed by accounting fraud at 29 per cent.
PWC found the "typical" perpetrator was male, had been in his position or with the company for less than two years, was aged in his thirties and had a secondary education or less.
"We found that interesting," said Fisk.
"That might be true for a small business that's got a lot of workers, where it's relatively low value, high volume crime. But for some of the higher value frauds, that's not necessarily the profile that we've experienced.
"Often it's female rather than male, often it's someone that's a trusted employee that's been put in charge of the accounts payable, the bank reconciliations and those sort of admin tasks, and the other thing we found is the more senior you go the higher the value of the fraud tends to be."
The survey found that 36 per cent of firms and organisations that suffered an economic crime did not report it to police or other authorities and 16 per cent did nothing at all.
Only 53 per cent said they dismissed the perpetrator when it was an employee, which Fisk said was worrying.
"If people see that half the offending employees won't get dismissed, it affects the whole culture of the organisation.
"What we've found through the survey is that if you don't have the right culture and code of ethics you're going to be more at risk of suffering fraud.
"Organisations need to have an enforced policy on how incidents will be dealt with such as reporting these matters to executives and the board, and to the police."
While PWC found the incidence of bribery and corruption in New Zealand was relatively low, it rated fairly high in terms of what businesses were worried about.
Fisk said this reflected the risk of being exposed to bribery and corruption elsewhere in the world because of globalisation.
