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The purpose of this study is to assess, since the 2006 Fraud Review, recommendations, strategies and consequential organisational and other changes at national, regional and local levels relating to fraud, using the Northeast as a case study. It also notes that implementation may have been influenced by institutional changes and related emerging governmental policy agendas and institutional changes relating to organised crime, terrorism and cybercrime.

The research for the paper was undertaken by desk reviews of primary and secondary material. The paper also involved face-to-face interviews with personnel from the regional fraud unit and the three North-east police forces’ fraud units. The interviews were semi-structured and were conducted on grounds of anonymity for the personnel and the forces involved, with a focus on trends and issues. The personnel were invited to comment on a draft of the paper in terms of accuracy of the information they provided; no revisions or additions were proposed. Interpretation of that information is the sole responsibility of the author.

The paper finds that, despite the decade since the Fraud Review, issues of effectiveness or relevance of national fraud strategies, absence of incentives and identifiable benefits and continuous influence of competing agendas on police priorities continue to marginalise fraud as a mainstream police function and limit the level of resource committed to what also continues to be a rising area of criminality.

The research looks at the recommendations, strategies and consequential organisational and other changes at national, regional and local levels through implementation by four policing units in the North-east. It also notes that implementation may have been influenced by institutional changes and related emerging governmental policy agendas and institutional changes relating to organised crime, terrorism and cybercrime. While the research is limited in that, it draws on the experience of three local and one regional fraud unit; its findings support further research about the implementation of strategies and agendas in practice on the ground.

The research validates many of the findings by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) and supports the need to review national strategies to ensure effective implementation at local level for what also continues to be a rising area of criminality.

The research raises important issues concerning public concern over fraud where majority of frauds are of high volume, low value with low levels of recovery and usually targeted at individuals but where the policing responses are targeted elsewhere.

The research is the first study on the local implementation of national strategies on fraud and raises positive and less positive aspects of how far national strategies and intentions are addressed on the ground.

The purpose of this paper is to present a comparative appraisal of structures, fraud loss and performance data in London local authorities (LAs) with that of the National Health Service (NHS) and the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) in order to test the Fraud Review's contention that LAs are “less well equipped” to deal with fraud than central government departments.

Primary research was undertaken through questionnaires to all London boroughs and interviews with key personnel in two comparator organisations.

London boroughs are no less competent or effective in investigating fraud. Each has a specialist anti‐fraud response and has similar levels of performance as comparator organisations. Whilst London boroughs outperform in some areas such as sanctions per officer against the NHS and detection levels in benefit fraud against the DWP, there are concerns over higher per unit staffing cost, principally caused by the autonomous and diverse nature of local government. Further that some authorities are unaware of, or unwilling to deal with, certain fraud typologies.

The research was limited to London local government and further work is needed outside the capital.

Recommendations are made for the introduction of an explicit statutory requirement for LAs to have an anti‐fraud resource, standardisation of definitions and consideration of borough‐based multi‐agency fraud teams.

There has been no previous research of this type and it may be useful to government when considering how to deal with fraud, LAs and those with an interest in public sector fraud.

The purpose of this paper is to present an empirical study and contribute to the discussion of administrative ethics and integrity by investigating three ethical issues, namely trust, good governance and unethical actions in the Finnish public administration.

The evidence of this research is based on empirical data from a National Citizen Survey implemented in 2008 by the University of Vaasa. The questionnaire was sent to 5,000 Finnish citizens and the response rate was 40.4 percent.

The strength of the Finnish society concerning trust is that the citizens feel confident in public sector organizations and societal institutions. Even though serious corruption cases have remained few in Finland, there is still work to do in order to keep the situation under control. Ignorant and bad treatment of citizens occurs mostly in individual service encounters, it does not reflect the whole of the ethics of administration.

Further research is needed in order to investigate the societal background factors that can explain the different findings from the research questions. Also further research is required for comparing the results of different countries.

Strengths and weaknesses are identified as a tool for further research and for the work for practitioners.

The core contribution of the paper is a contribution to knowledge concerning citizens' perceptions of trust, good governance and unethical actions in an egalitarian society.

Government corruption and secrecy are not new phenomena in Africa; however, international scrutiny has grown as nations end decades of conflict and seek to develop, donor nations consider providing more aid, and investors and transnational corporations look to the area for oil and other resources. Given that corrupt government activities account for millions of dollars diverted from public coffers each year in developing nations and lead to unfair benefit distribution to citizens, the chapter examines the global network of actors attempting to advance the international norm of government accountability to constrain corruption through advocating for the adoption of access-to-information legislation. The chapter also explores the relationship between perception of corruption in Africa and four political institutions of vertical accountability. The findings indicate that perception of corruption is inversely correlated with news media rights, civil liberties, and political rights. However, adopting access-to-information legislation or planning to adopt the law was not correlated with the perception of corruption.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between the ethical culture of organisations and organisational innovativeness.

A quantitative empirical analysis was conducted on the basis of a survey of 147 respondents within the public sector in Finland. A multivariate linear regression analysis was done to examine how the ethical culture of organisations is related to organisational innovativeness.

A positive link was found in the ethical culture of an organisation and organisational innovativeness: ethical culture was important to behavioural, strategic and process innovativeness. Within the ethical culture of an organisation, the dimension of the congruency of management in particular had an important role in organisational innovativeness.

The data were collected from the public sector, and therefore, future studies from the private sector organisations are needed. The results lend support to previous research arguments for the positive effect of an ethical organisational culture on organisational outcomes, particularly the organisational innovativeness described in this paper.

It is suggested that congruency of management, discussability and supportability are the organisational virtues which can most effectively enhance organisational innovativeness, specifically behavioural, strategic and process innovativeness in practice.

The research paper provides empirical evidence on the interrelation between the ethical culture of organisations and organisational innovativeness; evidence which is scarce in existing literature on organisational innovativeness. Thus, the paper helps fill this gap in the literature in the field.

The objective of this study is to examine the predicting role of Machiavellianism, locus of control and moral identity on ethical leadership. This study also assessed the moderating role of ethical role modelling in the linkage between Machiavellianism, locus of control, moral identity and ethical leadership.

A total of 202 public service leaders in Malaysia participated in the study. A quantitative study was conducted and structural equation modelling was used to test the hypotheses.

Moral identity poses a substantial influence on ethical leadership. Ethical role modelling is a significant moderator in the association between moral identity and ethical leadership.

This study contributes to the social learning theory by assessing Machiavellianism, locus of control and moral identity as the predictors of ethical leadership among public service leaders in Malaysia. Future study can be further extended to both managerial and support staff to understand the ethical phenomenon in Malaysian public sector.

The study highlights the need for public sector to give considerable attention to moral identity in boosting ethical leadership among public service leaders in Malaysia's public sector. Furthermore, the element of ethical role modelling should not be neglected as this factor is a valid moderator in nurturing ethical leadership among public service leaders.

The study deepens the knowledge on the importance of ethical role modelling as a moderator in assessing the influence of the predictors on ethical leadership. Further, this study demonstrates that public service leaders who reported high moral identity would have higher ethical leadership if they experienced good ethical role modelling.

First party fraud is fraud committed by an account holder or customer that does not involve the use of a stolen identity. This type of fraud has grown substantially in recent times due to increased online shopping and is becoming a major concern for online retail businesses, hereby referred to as e-tailers. The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into the motives and nature of first party fraud in e-tailing.

Systematic literature review was used to synthesise existing research on first party fraud. The authors used scholarly literature as well as grey literature to help understand the motives and nature of this growing business problem.

Findings reveal a myriad of schemes and motives for engaging in first party fraud.

The findings of this paper employed very little literature due to availability. However, the authors believe that the findings are still useful for advancing the knowledge in this emerging research area.

This study will be useful to researchers as well as practitioners in the retail industry in helping understand the nature and motives of first party frauds which could in turn help devise preventive strategies. The study also makes a case for increased managerial interest and involvement in reducing first party fraud.

A comprehensive literature search presented in this paper shows that this is the first paper to synthesise the various forms of first party fraud in e-tailing.

Two-stage production systems including a processing shop and an assembly stage are widely used in various manufacturing industries. These two stages are usually studied independently which may not lead to ideal results. This paper aims to deal with a two-stage production system including a job shop and an assembly stage.

Some exact methods are proposed based on branch and bound (B&B) approach to minimize the total completion time of products. As B&B approaches are usually time-consuming, three efficient lower bounds are developed for the problem and variable neighborhood search is used to provide proper upper bound of the solution in each branch. In addition, to create branches and search new nodes, two strategies are applied including the best-first search and the depth-first search (DFS). Another feature of the proposed algorithms is that the search space is reduced by releasing the precedence constraint. In this case, the problem becomes equivalent to a parallel machine scheduling problem, and the redundant branches that do not consider the precedence constraint are removed. Therefore, the number of nodes and computational time are significantly reduced without eliminating the optimal solution.

Some numerical examples are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed methods. Comparison result to mathematical model (mixed-integer linear programming) validates the performance accuracy and efficiency of the proposed methods. In addition, computational results indicate the superiority of the DFS strategy with regard to CPU time.

Studies about the scheduling problems for two-stage production systems including job shop followed by an assembly stage traditionally present approximate method and metaheuristic algorithms to solve the problem. This is the first study that introduces exact methods based on (B&B) approach.

Multiple stages of procurement for a product in a supply chain (SC) altogether form a “multi-Tier” supply network. The purpose of this paper is to develop and verify a systematic solution approach to ascertain the realistic cost advantage of a coordinated centralized sourcing strategy as compared to an isolated decentralized sourcing strategy for a multi-tier supply network under demand uncertainty.

The proposed systematic solution approach consists of seven steps to compare and contrast the cost advantage of a centralized coordinated sourcing strategy over a decentralized stage-wise sourcing strategy for a multi-tier supply network. A real-life automotive industry case analysis of two distinct products provides sufficient empirical evidence on the expected cost advantage of centralized coordinated sourcing strategy under demand uncertainty.

The case analysis affirms the practicability of the proposed seven-step solution approach to determine the realistic cost advantage of coordinated sourcing.

The scope of this research is restricted to a single product and two-tier supply network analysis. This research work also considers a restrictive assumption of negligible coordination cost.

The suitability of the proposed solution approach is verified using real-life case examples. This research provides theoretical insights and factual evidence to SC practitioners, so as to adopt a centralized sourcing strategy in a varied manufacturing environment.

There is no evidence of a systematic step-by-step solution approach to determine the cost advantage of a coordinated sourcing strategy over an isolated decentralized sourcing strategy for a multi-tier supply network under demand uncertainty.