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1. Introduction
The economic impact of a white-collar crime is massive. An estimate of the cost of a white-collar crime to companies, government and society around the world is around US$10tn annually worldwide (The Millennium Project, 2008). Further, a survey done by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) reports that about 30 per cent of more than 3,600 companies they studied had suffered from fraudulent acts, with an average loss of US$2m. Those dossiers are supported by the empirical findings in the white-collar crime topic. For instance, Hilb (2008) addressed that corporate accounting scandals in the USA, such as Enron, Global Crossing, Tyco, HealthSouth, WorldCom and Adelphia, involved companies that experienced serious stock market collapses caused by corporate and white-collar crimes. On the other hand, Friedrichs (2009) found that white-collar criminals wreak havoc in the finances in the USA, which estimated to suffer economic damages about US$250bn to US$1tn every year.
Malaysia is no exception for this cost of white-collar crime issue. According to Lim (2005), about RM579m was involved in 11,714 white-collar crime cases in 2003. Fewer cases were reported in 2004 (9,899 cases); however, the amount of losses escalated to RM836.29m. A study by Liew and Puah (2011) found that those companies in Malaysia, such as Kenmark Industrial Co (M) Behad, Alliance Financial Group Berhad and Sime Darby Berhad, had faced the decline in the stock price due to the announcement of authority abuse and suspected of fraud. An anecdotal evidence documents a whopping RM1.775bn was lost through scams, embezzlement, criminal breach of trust and other white-collar crimes in 2013 in Malaysia (Mohamed, 2014). The report also shows that the police investigation over white-collar crime cases tripled in the past 10 years, with criminal breach of trust, cheating and misappropriation of funds forming the bulk of cases. In addition, a report by PwC (2014) reported that economic crimes such as asset misappropriation, procurement fraud, corruption and bribery, cybercrime and accounting fraud are the most common crimes that occurred in Malaysia. Apart from that, Integrity (2013) revealed that the illicit financial flows from the developing world in 2011 were recorded about US$946.7bn as compared to US$832.4bn in 2010. In terms of the largest cumulative illicit financial outflows over the period of 2002-2011, Malaysia was ranked fourth across all...