Abstract:
Fraud is a major economic crime affecting businesses around the world each year and received tremendous public attention. Not only concentrating on the private sector, fraud in the public sector has and always will continue to be a thorn in the inside of any government throughout the world. In Malaysia, fraudulent activities were also found to be occurred in its government. The main objective of the study is to identify the elements of monitoring mechanisms that might be influenced to reduce the level of fraud incidents in Malaysian government. The monitoring mechanisms provided in this study are good governance, internal control procedures and fraud prevention programs. A survey was conducted to various government officers and 91 usable responses were received. Results showed that generally, misappropriation of assets was ranked to be the most fraud case which frequently occurred in the Malaysian government agencies. Based on a regression analysis The results of the study indicated that only one element of the internal control procedures namely the policies was significant in reducing the fraud incidents. Besides, both of the good governance and fraud prevention programs were also proven to have the significant negative relationship with the occurrences of fraud within the Malaysian government agencies. Implications of these findings are discussed.
