Preventing Financial Statement Frauds: Analysis of the Role Played by the Corporate Governance

The escalating number of financial frauds, occurred in recent years, leads to an increasing attention paid by academics and practitioners to manage the phenomenon. Aiming to find some ways to prevent frauds, researchers have started to analyse the factors related to them to implement preventive actions and mechanisms to avoid/reduce the possibility of the fraud occurrence. Specifically, the focus has been addressed towards the relationship between some mechanisms of corporate governance and the fraud occurrence, considering the role of corporate governance mechanisms to solve governance problems and exercise a control function over the different actors of the firm. In this work we analyse the impact of the corporate governance as a whole on financial statement frauds, considering the entire system of governance variables within firms.