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 recog­ nizing certain clues or risk factors that are frequently associated with the misappropriation of entity assets. Based on three of the risk factors iden­ tified 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 work­ place 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 traininR, nor part-time work experience, helped the subjects recognize an increased level ofvulner­ ability of an organization to employee theft.