Misconduct and Fraud by Investment Managers

We document the prevalence and variety of frauds committed by investment managers. We show that prior legal and regulatory violations, conflicts-of-interest, and monitoring disclosures available via the Security and Exchange Commission’s Form ADV are useful for predicting fraud. Additional tests show that fraud by rogue employees is more predictable than firm-wide fraud, but both types of fraud are significantly predictable. We revisit the fraud prediction model of Dimmock and Gerken (2012) and test its performance out-of-sample (using fraud cases discovered since that article’s publication). We find the model has significant predictive power for the out-of-sample cases. To encourage additional research in this area, we have made the data used in this chapter publicly available.