ACCT 654 Week 5 Discussion Board Forum 4 Thread Example

Discussion Board Forum 4 Thread: Interviewing and Detecting Deception in Fraud Cases

ACCT 654 Fraud Examination, Discussion Board Forum 4 Thread

Thread by [Student Name]

The thread answers a composite prompt on fraud interviews; the studies and Bible passage cited are real.

A fraud examiner should not try to read lies from an interviewee's behavior. Research shows that people, including professionals, are poor at it, and that the reliable path to the truth runs through planning the interview around the documents and letting the person's account be tested against them.

The base rate is sobering. In a meta-analysis of more than 200 studies, Bond and DePaulo (2006) found that people classified statements as truthful or deceptive correctly only about 54 percent of the time, slightly better than flipping a coin, and that they recognized truths more readily than lies. Vrij et al. (2010) explain why: the nonverbal cues people rely on, such as averted gaze and fidgeting, are at best weakly related to lying, and nervous truthful people display them too. An examiner who watches for nervousness will mistake anxious honest employees for liars and miss the calm ones who are lying.

What does work is changing the structure of the interview. Hartwig et al. (2006) trained one group of interviewers in the strategic use of evidence, withholding what they knew until the suspect had committed to an account. The trained interviewers judged deception correctly in about 85 percent of cases, while untrained interviewers, who tended to reveal evidence early, performed near chance. Liars who did not know what the interviewer knew contradicted the evidence, and those contradictions were far more informative than body language.

The method of questioning matters for the integrity of the result as well. Meissner et al. (2014) compared accusatorial methods, which rely on confrontation and pressure, with information-gathering methods, which build rapport and invite a full account. Their meta-analysis found that information-gathering approaches preserved or increased true confessions while reducing false ones in experimental studies. For a fraud examiner whose findings may end up in court, a confession obtained by pressure is a liability, not a success.

Scripture offers a principle that fits these findings: Proverbs observes that whoever speaks first in a dispute sounds right until someone else questions the account (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Proverbs 18:17). The first story an examiner hears always sounds plausible. Justice requires hearing it fully and then examining it, which is exactly what strategic disclosure does. The principle also protects the innocent, since a fair examination allows an honest account to be confirmed by the documents.

Applied to a suspected billing scheme, the plan would be straightforward. The examiner would gather invoices, receiving records and vendor registration documents first, interview the receiving staff and approvers, and only then interview the employee under suspicion. That interview would open with broad questions about the purchasing process and the vendor, let the employee explain in detail, and introduce the missing receiving records one at a time, noting where the account and the documents part ways. The interview would be recorded in a memorandum written the same day, describing what was asked and answered without characterizing the employee's demeanor. If the employee offered an innocent explanation, such as deliveries made directly to a storeroom, the examiner would test it against the storeroom records before drawing any conclusion. That discipline keeps the examination fair and its findings defensible.

References

Bond, C. F., Jr., & DePaulo, B. M. (2006). Accuracy of deception judgments. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10(3), 214-234. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr1003_2

English Standard Version Bible. (2016). Crossway. (Original work published 2001)

Hartwig, M., Granhag, P. A., Stromwall, L. A., & Kronkvist, O. (2006). Strategic use of evidence during police interviews: When training to detect deception works. Law and Human Behavior, 30(5), 603-619. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10979-006-9053-9

Meissner, C. A., Redlich, A. D., Michael, S. W., Evans, J. R., Camilletti, C. R., Bhatt, S., & Brandon, S. (2014). Accusatorial and information-gathering interrogation methods and their effects on true and false confessions: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Experimental Criminology, 10(4), 459-486. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11292-014-9207-6

Vrij, A., Granhag, P. A., & Porter, S. (2010). Pitfalls and opportunities in nonverbal and verbal lie detection. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 11(3), 89-121. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100610390861