How a qualitative and empirical approach to research can support understanding of the organisation of complex financial crime

Gilbert, Jonathan

Abstract

This paper will examine how innovative methodologies can support a qualitative and empirical approach to researching complex financial crime. It will be argued that this approach can improve understanding of how crime is organised, beyond the biographies and responsibilities of criminal actors. It can support a higher level of understanding that identifies what the crime-commissioning processes are and how criminal actors are able to commission and reproduce financial crime, whilst avoiding disruptive forces. The speaker will provide an overview of his doctoral and subsequent published research into the organisation of mortgage fraud in the UK and its relationship to the governance, control and regulation of financial services. Qualitative methods of data collection included semi-structured interviews with both the organisers and preventers of mortgage fraud, prosecution documentation and regulatory enforcement files. This was allied to the researcher’s own biographic and auto-ethnographic empirical observations of mortgage fraud, as a former solicitor-enabler. It will be argued that whilst qualitative studies into financial crime have included data from police, regulatory and prosecution case files, interviewees have been predominantly crime preventers. Accordingly, there remains a need for caution when analysing data that has been sourced from agencies tasked with investigating and prosecuting fraud, particularly as evidence and documentation would have been collected, collated and processed according to investigative protocols, resource parameters and substantially an institutionally established actor-orientated focus. In offender-based studies, the veracity and validity of the accounts given by offenders has sometimes been challenged on peer-review, particularly in determining whether participating offenders are “speaking ‘the’ truth or ‘their’ truth”. Bernasco argues an offender’s first-hand account provides valuable empirical data, and is instrumental in answering; “How did a person learn to commit an offence? How precisely was a specific crime enacted? […] What made the offender decide in favour of a particular target?” (2010, p.5). Additionally, these subjective accounts can be tested alongside other data to inform the case studies that are generalisable to theoretical propositions. Accordingly, it is proposed that collecting data from both organisers and preventers, coupled to an ethnographic and biographic perspective, support the triangulation of data and enhances the validity and reliability of the findings. A multiple-case study research design was subsequently chosen as a means of identifying those substantive relations of connections between criminal actors that supported the commission and reproduction of mortgage fraud. These relations will be identified within the mortgage fraud crime script which was chosen as a conceptual framework to identify the crime-commissioning processes of a conventional and reproductive mortgage fraud particularly those processes that are necessary to support commission (and reproduction) and those that are otherwise contingent.

• Presentation Conference Type: Presentation / Talk
• Conference Name: People, Work and Organisations Conference
• Start Date: Jun 18, 2025
• Deposit Date: Jun 20, 2025
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 20, 2025
• Peer Reviewed: Not Peer Reviewed
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/14582458