Jai | Journal of Accounting and Investment, vol. 19 no. 2, July 2018
Does Type of Fraudulent Act Have an Impact
On Whistleblowing Intention?
Caesar Marga Putri*
ABSTRACT: The purpose of this research is to examine empirically the impact of
two types of fraudulent act on individual’s reporting intention under reward model.
This research applied the Reinforcement theory in designing whistleblowing
policies. In this context, reward system in encouraging disclosure of fraudulent act
was used. This study was designed using experiment method 2x2 between subjects
with 86 participants from private universities. Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 requires
that every public company must establish anonymous channel regarding disclosure
of fraudulent act. However, under the reward system it may become different
prediction that non-anonymous channel is preferable than the other one. Using
two types of fraudulent act, this research investigated whether those types
affected individual’s intention for disclosing fraud in choosing the reporting
channel because a reward is provided or not. The result shows that the interaction
between the type of fraudulent act and type of channel could encourage
individual’s intention to blow the whistle. However, individual prefers to report the
misappropriation of asset through anonymous channel than non-anonymous even
though a reward is provided.
KEYWORDS: reward system; type of fraudulent act; whistleblowing intention
Introduction
The purpose of reporting fraud in the organization is to achieve economic
goal as well as social goal. In order to achieve those goals, support from
others is needed by whistleblower, even though fact shows that
whistleblowers will get lots of harms. Elliston (1982) states that employee
only has a little right and will be refused by other employees. Retaliation is
one of the negative consequences for whistleblower. There are a lot of
studies concerning retaliation on employee who blow the whistle, one of
them is a study conducted by Liyanarachichi and Newdick (2009). Reporters
of wrongdoing probably expect a strong procedural protection to hide
identity (Kaplan, Peny, Samuels & Zang, 2009).
Whistleblowing as an effective mechanism for disclosing corporate fraud is
highlighted by the disclosure of the biggest reporting scandal that involves
two corporations in United States: Enron and WorldCom (Bowen, Call &
Rajagopal, 2010). In Indonesia, one of the whistleblowing cases has been
conducted by the former head of Indonesian National Police's Criminal
Investigation Agency who disclosed corruption scandal that happened in
the police department (Lestari & Yaya, 2017).
The importance of whistleblowing to disclose corporate malfeasance
encourages regulator for creating effective ways to disclose wrongdoing in
organization. Section 301 & 806 of Sarbanes-Oxley Act 2002 are designed
to encourage whistleblowing and provide safety from retaliation. Section
301 and 806 require audit committee of corporate director that already
Department of Accounting,
Universitas Muhammadiyah
Yogyakarta, JL. Brawijaya,
Tamantirto, Kasihan, Bantul,
Yogyakarta Special Region,
Indonesia
*Correspondence:
caesar.margaputri@umy.ac.id
This article is avalilable in:
http://journal.umy.ac.id/index.php/ai
DOI: 10.18196/jai.1902102
Citation:
Putri, C. M. (2018). Does Type of
Fraudulent Act Have an Impact On
Whistleblowing Intention?.
Journal of Accounting and
Investment, 19(2), 210-225.
Received:
11 April 2018
Reviewed:
30 April 2018
Revised:
10 May 2018
Accepted:
24 July 2018
Copyright: © 2018 Putri.
This is an open access
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Commons Attribution
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reproduction in any
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original author and source
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