Capital Punishment And Financial Reporting Fraud: Implications For Secular Countries

Several papers investigate of the impact of the death penalty on the occurrence of FRF in an Islamic society. However, no study examines such a relationship in a secular society. This study examines whether imposing the death penalty can protect an Anglo-Saxon secular society from the diverse consequences of FRF. This paper addresses the research question in two ways. First, we extrapolate the rationale for capital punishment for committing FRF in Islamic countries to the Anglo-Saxon society, whose penal system embraces a non-Islamic view of death penalty. We conduct detailed exploratory analysis of the existing theoretical as well as empirical research that either advocates or opposes the role of capital punishment to prevent white color crime. Second, we establish an extended fraud pentagon model, which in our opinion could better lay out fraud preventing mechanism. Our fraud pentagon model consists of five components–pressure/incentives, opportunity, capability, rationalization/religious beliefs, and accountability. Our analysis of the current Anglo-Saxon penal system indicates that the secular society is imposing stricter punishment than ever, for committing white color crimes as FRF. However, given that the existing Anglo- Saxon regulations and penal system could not effectively deter the occurrence of FRF, we argue that the Anglo-Saxon society should not widely discard the notion of imposing the capital punishment for committing FRF, especially, if a financial crime is found to cause major damage to the society. This assertion particularly becomes logical, in light of the utilitarian view of punishment–which argues that death penalty can effectively curtail the incidence of major crimes in the society. Finally, we show that it is important to add a fifth element–accountability to the existing fraud model. The findings of this study are important given that (1) both policymakers are continually trying to form new regulation and laws to stop FRF, and (2) the academic community broadly disagrees on the efficacy of death sentence to combat crime. The findings imply that the impact of the death penalty in curbing FRF apply to Anglo-Saxon societies and, therefore, lawmakers and regulators should not simply disallow the notion of imposing capital punishment to FRF fraudsters.