An Exploration of Management Fraud in the Nigerian Banking Industry – A Sociocultural Perspective

Management fraud is an established concern in various organisations and industries across the globe. This concern relates to stakeholders including but not limited to employees, investors, regulators, creditors, external auditors, and the public. Despite numerous efforts to eradicate this category of fraud through the adoption of different studies, codes, and reforms, it remains an unending menace across all economies. Hence, this study on management fraud aims to explore the relevance of the sociocultural environment in the prevention of management fraud within the context of the Nigerian banking industry. To achieve this, this study explored a sociocultural perspective to viewing management fraud and deconstructed the expressions associated with the problem. The data used for this study was obtained from certified fraud examiners who have experience in the Nigerian banking industry. The study adopts a mixed research method, using semi-structured interviews and online questionnaires. The study’s findings reveal that management fraud is a broad term for fraud committed at the top management level, which is expressed in different ways and has distinct tools for its operationalisation. This leads to the first contribution of this study to knowledge, which is the deconstruction of the phenomenon of management fraud and how it is operationalised. The second contribution relates to theory by situating the relevance of social institutions into the institutional theory, Hofstede’s cultural dimension theory, and the differential association theory. The third contribution of the study to the body of knowledge and literature is the introduction of the sociocultural environment to the discussion of fraud at the top management level within the Nigerian banking industry. The fourth contribution to knowledge is the identification of the sequence of management fraud's impact on stakeholders, which suggests an inclusive policy formulation to ameliorate the impact of management fraud on stakeholders. Areas for future studies were also considered in this study.