Economic crimes in SA

        Economic crime in SA has increased in cost.

South Africa's Johannesburg In 2020, the proportion of South African organizations that had dealt with economic crime drastically decreased, reaching levels last seen in 2011. From 77% in 2018 to 60% this year, the rate of reported economic crime has decreased by 17 percentage points. These are some of the main conclusions from the seventh South African edition of PwC's yearly Global Economic Crime and Fraud Survey, which was released today.

Notwithstanding this drop, South Africa still has a substantially higher percentage of economic crime than the global average of 47%. The grim reality that higher value severe economic crime, defined as crimes with a value greater than US$100 million, now accounts for 4% of all crimes is added to this.

According to Trevor White, a PwC Forensic Partner and the leader of the Global Economic Crime and Fraud Survey for South Africa:

With the rash of scandals that have recently rocked South Africa's public and corporate sectors, it should come as no surprise that organizations view bribery and corruption as the most significant economic crimes that have an impact on businesses. This has caused the value of damages incurred as a result to climb significantly, along with senior management's greater involvement in committing such crimes.

Senior management's level of involvement as the primary offender increased from 20% in 2018 to 34% in 2020.

South Africa has dropped to third place in the top ten list of nations with the highest reported rates of economic crime in the world, with respondents in India and China reporting the highest incidences. India has never before appeared in the top ten.

Around 5000 responses from 99 countries were analyzed as part of the Global Economic Crime and Fraud Study. It discussed the overall observations from businesses that had, on average, six incidents over the previous two years. The paper offers information on the threat, the expense of fraud, and what businesses should do to strengthen their proactive actions.

economic crime types

According to the poll this year, customer fraud has replaced corruption and bribery as the most common economic crime (South Africa: 47%; Global: 35%), followed by accounting/financial statement fraud (South Africa: 34%; Global: 28%).

One of the main causes for businesses to take a close look at themselves and consider what is being done to combat the plague of economic crime has been the prevalence of accounting/financial statement-related fraud, which has claimed many lives in recent years.