How Culture & Ethics Fuel (or Fight) Fraud

CoSteer had the opportunity to share the platform with Tenet Litigation and Law Firm to speak on the subject matter on 'Disengaged or Disillusioned? How Culture & Ethics Fuel (or Fight) Fraud'

Over 150 registered - thank you all for coming.

Fraud isn’t just about bad actors. It’s about pressure, systems, disillusionment, and silence. Culture misalignment between leadership and the employee experience is a major, often overlooked, fraud risk factor. A fractured organisational culture can quickly escalate into litigation and disputes, exposing businesses to significant reputational risk and regulatory scrutiny.

The conversation was led by what decades of data reveal about how employees truly feel and explores emerging cultural patterns around decision-making, governance, ethics, and fraud risk by Perrin Carey, Founder & CEO of CoSteer and Arun Chauhan, Director & Founder of Tenet

Using evidence-based practice and insights from behavioural analysis, the session explored:

👉 Call It Culture: Let’s get real… culture isn’t what’s written in mission statements. It’s not a PDF or poster on the wall. It’s what people do when no one’s watching. Exploring how culture manifests in real-life decision-making and why ignoring what’s happening can lead to gaping holes remaining undetected.

👉 The Silence Trap: You’ve got policies. You’ve got procedures. But what if the real risk lies in what employees aren’t saying? We delve into how organisational culture, when not properly understood or measured, only allows us to examine the tip of the iceberg issue, rather than the depth of the challenge itself, especially when leadership assumes silence equals compliance.

👉 What Governance Looks Like: Beyond frameworks and tick-boxes, governance is shaped by collective behaviour, contribution, communication, and clarity of purpose. We explore how risk fatigue, rule-bending and misalignment create blind spots and how culture can strengthen fraud strategy from the inside out.

👉 Where Fraud Starts: Fraud rarely begins with a grand plan. It often starts with a small exception, a just-this-once moment, or a culture that tolerates ethical shortcuts. We discuss how ethical drift erodes controls, how early signs can be spotted, and how better leadership can support people to do the right thing.

👉 Bridging Theory & Practice: Case studies and takeaways based on primary data on how to increase transparency and embed culture-led fraud prevention. Explore how to identify and close the gap between values and lived behaviour.