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Introduction
Fraud is a unique crime (Anand et al., 2015). Many organisations both private and public sectors are struggling to deal with it. Importantly, fraud by collusion of two or more people, according to the latest study of Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE), is the most difficult crime to be detected and results in high financial loss for organisation [1]. Surprisingly, this kind of fraud remains “clouded and shallow”, and it cannot be solved by the preventive framework which is focused on the solo psychology of fraud perpetrators (Free and Murphy, 2015).
In analysing the most common reason why employees committed fraud, some people argue that social structures in organisation can give unique cues. For example, within corrupt organisation hierarchical relationships or some kinds of organisational networks, as Lambsdorff (2002) said, contribute to the fundamental causes of a fraud problem. Lambsdorff (2002) explains (political) connections is potential to be important factor in spreading information about opportunistic circumstances. Similarly, Zuber (2015) argues that a social network of fraud perpetrators is highly likely to contribute to unethical behaviour across organisations.
Under such conditions, Lambsdorff (2002) concludes it is often to see more opportunistic behaviours occurring in the function of the board levels rather than the management levels. This statement was also supported by qualitative research (Brown and Mitchell, 2010), showing that corporate leaders commonly maintain the existing close relationships, particularly if such relationships give more profitable solutions than other alternatives. Occasionally, it occurs if those leaders lose productivity. A secret agreement between two or more related people for a deceitful or fraudulent purpose cannot be separated in such contexts (Brown and Mitchell, 2010). This illustrates that the enduring of cooperation among fraudsters implicitly represents a necessary and enough circumstance for committing fraud. It is always possible for potential fraudster to consider much more the relatedness matters at the beginning before the commission of fraud, especially when they have enough power to manage the organisation they are entrusted with. It has been empirically suggested by Maulidi (2020), that reciprocity between two or more people cannot be overlooked. This is because changes on individual’s intention cannot be denied, especially in unethical behaviour in the name of the organisation. He also adds that, this kind of process can...