Intern kontroll

: kur kommunerna arbetar förebyggande mot bedrägligt beteende

Abstract

The deceitful behavior in municipalities has received more attention the last couple of years, media has focused on frauds and new scandals keep replacing each other. A strong, internal control is considered to contribute to less chance for an organization to be subject of fraudulent behavior. Some studies contradict this fact and indicate that technical controls and rules don’t affect this behavior in the extent that some people claim it to do. There are regulations in the local government law regarding how municipalities are supposed to work based on internal controls and who has the responsibility for everything to be done in a correct way. The purpose of the study is to provide an understanding of why the deceitful behavior exists despite the fact that internal controls are implemented in municipalities, and whether there is any connection to the human appetite for risk and decision making.

Since there is not an excessive amount of research within this particular field in Sweden it is well suited for an exploratory research strategy. The study’s approach is abductive and the method is of a qualitative character. Due to the fact that this study is dealing with fraudulent behavior, the empirical part of the study has been collected through semi structured interviews with respondents from five different municipalities.

The study's conclusions have emerged from four areas that are significant for the deceitful behavior. The first conclusion is that all five municipalities in the research has adequate internal control systems, an awareness regarding risk management which provides good conditions to ensure that the routines work effectively. Another conclusion for parts of the study which addresses ethics and the organizational culture is that these differentiate substantially between the municipalities. There’s a shortage of education within the field of internal controls and how to counter fraudulent behavior, which is easier discovered and dealt with if the employees are well educated in how to handle it. The municipalities take a limited consideration to human behavior, since they rather choose technical controls. This is considered to be favorable because controlling people is considered to be sensitive while controlling processes are not. There’s a clear connection of the frauds discovered in the interviews and the fact that people are not always rational, but rather base their actions on their own experience and probability assessments.