Among the many varieties of white collar crime prevalent in
South Africa today, the three most common are theft, financial
statement fraud, and bribery and corruption, probably in that
order.
All three kinds of crime also tend to be exacerbated by an
economic downturn, which often provides one of the three points in
the classic fraud triangle – the incentive to commit
crime. When jobs and bonuses are on the line, profits are down and
business and personal debt are piling up, employees are more
susceptible to cutting corners and exploiting weaknesses in
organisational controls.
Such loopholes represent the second point of the fraud triangle,
the opportunity to commit fraud. It tends to be easier to commit an
undetected economic crime during a recession because companies, in
an effort to cut costs, often inadvertently weaken their own
internal controls through injudiciously targeted retrenchment. For
instance, if there used to be three people doing
