A new empirical analysis of the relation between the board characteristics and corporate fraud

Abstract

The purpose of this elaborate is to confirm the results of Beasley (1996) and Farber (2005), i.e. to demonstrate that even today, despite the introduction of new laws and regulations, board independence remains correlated with the presence or absence of fraud and that companies guilty of fraud will try, after being discovered, to improve their boards from the point of view of composition. The further objective, that has not been addressed in the isector literature until now, is to identify possible greater correlations between specific types of fraud (financial statement fraud, unaudit/lack of internal control and bribery) and peculiar characteristics of the board or control system.