The response to dryness in Australia

The drought Australia now faces is leading to shifts in the perception of the continent, of Australians and the world. The ideals of lush green landscapes are making way for landscape designs in which dryness is a quality of the design. On a map of the world, Australia is enormous, and seems empty because development is concentrated around its edges. Its heart must be red, in the cultural projections of the world from images of Uluru, 'the rock', set in a flat desert with no relief. Of course the country is not really all desert - surely? - with low shrubs pretty much throughout. Inhabitation seems to cling to the edges where teh continent feels microclimatic effects from the adjacent oceans and edging mountain ranges, which screen the population from the real state of the environment - dry, harsh, amazing and unique. Australia is rightly proud of this harsh difference from its edges, but prefers the harshness to be 'out there'. At the moment however, the country is pretty much universally in drought, and the contrast between green and brown, that it has celebrated, even built its identity around, is disappearing to become brown throughout. Without the browning of Australia, some areas, such as tropical Queensland, are having their designed public landscapes and gardens revealed as an elaborate mythology, a landscape fraud.

A role mining inspired approach to representing user behaviour in ERP systems

Despite all attempts to prevent fraud, it continues to be a major threat to industry and government. Traditionally, organizations have focused on fraud prevention rather than detection, to combat fraud. In this paper we present a role mining inspired approach to represent user behaviour in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, primarily aimed at detecting opportunities to commit fraud or potentially suspicious activities. We have adapted an approach which uses set theory to create transaction profiles based on analysis of user activity records. Based on these transaction profiles, we propose a set of (1) anomaly types to detect potentially suspicious user behaviour and (2) scenarios to identify inadequate segregation of duties in an ERP environment. In addition, we present two algorithms to construct a directed acyclic graph to represent relationships between transaction profiles. Experiments were conducted using a real dataset obtained from a teaching environment and a demonstration dataset, both using SAP R/3, presently the most predominant ERP system. The results of this empirical research demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Fraudulent insurance claims : recent legal developments

Insurance fraud continues to be a major problem worldwide. This article will canvass recent legal developments in relation to selected issues and matters of particular concern to the insurance industry. This article is confined to fraudulent claims. Fraud may arise at various points in the insurance relationship, including initial fraud on placement and fraudulent breach of contract by the assured. Fraud at the outset by the assured is treated differently from innocent or negligent conduct. "Fraud" in the context of this paper embraces all claims where an insured intednds to deceive an insurer by getting out i money to which the insured knew he had no right. This article will examine fraudulent insurance claims.

Internal audit department characteristics/activities and audit fees : some evidence from Hong Kong firms

This study provides preliminary support for the notion that internal audit function assists in reducing external audit effort and fees. Data on internal audit characteristics and activities are obtained from survey respondents of Hong Kong companies and audit fee model data are acquired from their annual reports. The results of this study suggest that the external auditor of firms in Hong Kong rely on the internal audit function and subsequently charge a lower fee. Lower external audit fees are associated with a larger internal audit department and certain activities carried out by the internal audit. Specifically, lower external audit fees are associated with more internal audit effort spent on activities relating to financial statements, systems development and maintenance, operating efficiency and effectiveness, fraud investigations and unlimited access to internal auditors’ working papers. The results of this study suggest that the contribution of the internal audit may substitute for some substantive external auditing processes and lower monitoring costs.

Serious tax non compliance : motivation and guardianship

This article reviews what international evidence exists on the impact of civil and criminal sanctions upon serious tax noncompliance by individuals. This construct lacks sharp definitional boundaries but includes large tax fraud and large-scale evasion that are not dealt with as fraud. Although substantial research and theory have been developed on general tax evasion and compliance, their conclusions might not apply to large-scale intentional fraudsters. No scientifically defensible studies directly compared civil and criminal sanctions for tax fraud, although one U.S. study reported that significantly enhanced criminal sanctions have more effects than enhanced audit levels. Prosecution is public, whereas administrative penalties are confidential, and this fact encourages those caught to pay heavy penalties to avoid publicity, a criminal record, and imprisonment.

Immediate indefeasibility : is it under threat?

Immediate indefeasibility has been adopted in Australia for close to 40 years. Recently however, and against the backdrop of economic fragility and global deregulation, there has been a polite questioning of its place. In Australia, some may argue that case law developments and legislative reform have placed indefeasibility under the microscope — in New Zealand, a similar telescoping by the respected views of their Law Commission. This note examines these reforms. It concludes that these reforms do not place immediate indefeasibility under threat. Rather, they modify and adapt the doctrine to fit within the context of contemporary financial instruments. Nevertheless, changes have so far been piecemeal, and its time for a consistent and logical examination of this issue to occur on the national, rather than the stage of each state.

Amendments to the Land Title Act 1994 (Qld)

Wholesale amendments to the Land Title Act 1994 (Qld) were recently introduced with the passing of the Natural Resources and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2005 (Qld). The amendments were preceded by an extensive review of issues associated with the operation of the freehold land register and consultation with a number of stakeholders. The three articles that follow address different issues associated with these statutory amendments. The first article provides a brief overview of the amendments. The second article deals with particular amendments designed to combat mortgage fraud. In the third article, the question posed is whether further statutory amendment could better protect unregistered interests.

Qualified indefeasibility and the careless mortgagee

In recent years a great deal of case law has been generated in relation to mortgages where the mortgagee has not engaged in adequate identity verification of the mortgagor and the mortgage has subsequently been found to be forged. As a result, careless mortgagee provisions operate in Queensland as an exception to indefeasibility. Similar provisions are expected to commence soon in New South Wales. This article examines the mortgagee’s position with the benefit of indefeasibility and then considers the impact of the careless mortgagee provisions on the rights of a mortgagee under a forged mortgage, concluding that the provisions significantly change the dynamic between a registered mortgagee and registered owner who has not signed the mortgage. These provisions appear to give the mortgagee a conditional indefeasibility, with the intention of reducing the State’s exposure to the payment of compensation in the case of identity fraud. They are however, more successful in the case of forgery by a third party rather than forgery by a co-owner.

Hope, happiness and hoaxes

This paper gives a psychological hypothesis for the phenomenon of Internet seduction or scams from the victim's perspective. It addresses the question of why so many people get hooked on Internet relationships and lose large amounts of money on scams and hoaxes resulting in emotional and physical trauma.

Homo Pleonexus : Man of desire

This presentation gives a broad psychological background to the behaviour involved in internet scams both emotional and financial. These refer in particular to the situation in Nigeria, West Africa where Australian citizens have been caught up in advance fee fraud.

Corporate governance and misappropriation

This study examines the occurrence of misappropriation-type fraud within Australian listed firms and the relation between the incidence of this type of fraud and a firm's governance strength. We measure governance strength using factors relating to traditional corporate governance, such as board composition, CEO duality, and audit committee composition, as well as factors relating to information technology governance. In our study, we use actual dollar amount of fraud reported by listed companies responding to the 2004 KPMG Fraud Survey as one of three different misappropriation measures and publicly available firm-specific data to measure the other variables in the model. Our study found that where the chief executive officer (CEO) also holds the position of chairperson of the board of directors, the likelihood of fraud increases. We also find that the greater the number of independent directors on the audit committee, the lower the level of fraud. Taken together, these results are particularly encouraging as they provide support for regulatory bodies such as the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) and the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC), which place considerable emphasis on the importance of establishing good corporate governance practices. The study provides empirical evidence that employing good corporate governance reduces the risk of the misappropriation of assets.

Developing a simulator application to test the billing platform in telecom industry

Billing Mediation Platform (BMP) in telecommunication industry is used to process real-time streams of Call Detail Records (CDRs) which can be a massive number a day. The generated records by BMP can be deployed for billing purposes, fraud detection, spam filtering, traffic analysis, and churn forecast. Several of these applications are distinguished by real-time processing requiring low-latency analysis of CDRs. Testing of such a platform carries diverse aspects like stress testing of analytics for scalability and what-if scenarios which require generating of CDRs with realistic volumetric and appropriate properties. The approach of this project is to build user friendly and flexible application which assists the development department to test their billing solution occasionally. These generators projects have been around for a while the only difference are the potions they cover and the purpose they will be used for. This paper proposes to use a simulator application to test the BMPs with simulating CDRs. The Simulated CDRs are modifiable based on the user requirements and represent real world data.

A review of medical image watermarking requirements for teleradiology

Teleradiology allows medical images to be transmitted over electronic networks for clinical interpretation, and for improved healthcare access, delivery and standards. Although, such remote transmission of the images is raising various new and complex legal and ethical issues, including image retention and fraud, privacy, malpractice liability, etc., considerations of the security measures used in teleradiology remain unchanged. Addressing this problem naturally warrants investigations on the security measures for their relative functional limitations and for the scope of considering them further. In this paper, starting with various security and privacy standards, the security requirements of medical images as well as expected threats in teleradiology are reviewed. This will make it possible to determine the limitations of the conventional measures used against the expected threats. Further, we thoroughly study the utilization of digital watermarking for teleradiology. Following the key attributes and roles of various watermarking parameters, justification for watermarking over conventional security measures is made in terms of their various objectives, properties, and requirements. We also outline the main objectives of medical image watermarking for teleradiology, and provide recommendations on suitable watermarking techniques and their characterization. Finally, concluding remarks and directions for future research are presented.

Guilt in victims of internet scams

This is a presentation made (by invitation from the Queensland Police, Fraud Squad) to a group of Queenslanders all of whom had fallen victim to internet scams. The paper addresses the subject of guilt and why we may 'suffer' from it after a traumatic experience where the individual and/or the family have gone through a major financial or emotional loss.

The extent of the insured’s duty of disclosure : a comparative analysis of the disclosure obligations of insured in Australia, Singapore and China

Pre-contractual material disclosure and representation from an insurance policy proposer is the most important element for insurers to make a decision on whether a proposer is insurable and what are the terms and conditions if the proposal by the proposer is able to be insured. The issue this thesis researches and investigates focus on the issues related to the pre-contractual non-disclosures and misrepresentations of an insured under the principle of utmost good faith, by operation of laws, can achieve with different results in different jurisdiction. A similar disputed claim involving material non-disclosed personal information or misrepresentation at the pre-contractual stage from an insured with respect to both general and life insurance policies settled by an insurer in Australia could be that the policy is set aside ab initio by the insurers in Singapore or China. The jurisdictions this thesis examines are • Australia; • Singapore; and • China including Hong Kong.