An experimental assessment of business students' performance: Recognizing risk factors associated with misappropriation of assets

This paper reports the results of a study that was conducted to investigate the performance of senior-level business students as it pertains to recognizing certain clues or risk factors that are frequently associated with the misappropriation of entity assets. Based on three of the risk factors identified in SAS No. 82, an experiment was used to examine differences in performance based on academic major, fraud-specific knowledge, and certain experiences of the students. The primary contributions of this study are the discovery that: (1) an increasing number of risk factors; (2) knowledge accumulated in an accounting curriculum; (3) reading additional articles on the topic of employee theft; and (4) direct encounters with employee theft in the workplace were positively and significantly associated with recognizing an increased possibility that employee theft may be occurring. The results also indicate that neither employer-provided fraud training, nor part-time work experience, helped the subjects recognize an increased level of vulnerability of an organization to employee theft.