MSc Financial Crime and Compliance in Digital Societies (top-up) (blended learning)

This module provides students with an advanced grounding in the modes of thinking and analysis required for developing explanatory accounts of the motivations, conditions and factors within businesses that together can lead to financial crime and compliance risks. When companies encounter insider and outsider threats and risks to their business, senior managers need to understand how and why certain individuals pose, or posed, these risks, and how circumstances in the company might have contributed to this. How did opportunities for non-compliance or financial crime arise within the business? How were employees able to conceal their transgressions? Which strategies or policy changes would have prevented this from happening? Academic theories can inform decision-making approaches to dealing with such risks and developing policies and practices that can reduce them in future which can in turn make businesses more robust, efficient and compliant, and in turn protect customers, investors and reputations more broadly.

In these terms, this module teaches students about empirically informed theories of (non-) compliance and regulation that will help them to understand risks and violations (what, why and how), the organisational contexts within which opportunities for non-compliance emerge, and actual and potential public and private regulatory and governance responses (risk assessment vs. crime control vs. regulation). The module provides students with a multi-layered, multi-level theoretical tool-kit that can be used to understand i. individual motivations and propensities for engaging in risky practices, ii. how company cultures, structures and policies can inadvertently provide the opportunity, means, setting and rationale for problematic behaviour, and iii. how wider political-economic environments feed into individual decisions to engage in behaviours bad for business.

CRIM70003 FCC Online Conditions (Programme 10177)

The unit aims to provide students with an advanced grounding in the modes of thinking and analysis required for developing explanatory accounts of the motivations, conditions and factors within businesses that together can lead to governance, compliance and financial crime risks.

Students will learn how to critically assess which theoretical perspectives provide the most plausible explanations for different risks within the business, both old and emerging. This high-level theoretical framing will provide students with knowledge that can be integrated into business policy and practice with a view to reducing, preventing and responding to internal and external threats.

Syllabus:

Week 1: Introducing Financial Crime (and the Need for Advanced Theory)

Week 2: Introducing Compliance: The Governance Turn

Week 3: Proximal Factors: Individual Motivations and Situational Components of Financial Crime and Compliance Risks

Week 4: Distal Factors: Organisational Contexts and Structural Conditions

Week 5: Consolidation Week

Week 6: Modes of Analysis I: ‘Scripting’ the Dynamics of Business Risk

Week 7: Modes of Analysis II: ‘Network’ Approaches to Financial Crime and Compliance Risks

Week 8: Case Study I – Globalised Economies and the AML Transnational Legal Order

Week 9: Case Study II – Business Compliance, Modern Slavery and Associated Finances

Week 10: Revision Week

LEARNING AND TEACHING PROCESSES (INCLUDING THE USE OF E-LEARNING)

Online, blended learning on the TNE (Transnational Education) e-learning platform with three optional residential visits to Manchester. Online learning materials will consist of a mixture of video and audio files alongside written text and instructions accompanied by interactive engagement activities and tasks. 

Students will possess a theoretical and conceptual took-kit for determining the most plausible explanations for risk, threats and transgressions inside and outside their business

Students will recognise the complexity and multiplex nature of the business world within which regulatory and governance problems, and financial crime risks occur

Students will build on their professional knowledge and experience with theory and concepts to make sense of workplace deviance and inform strategy creation and operational policies to make their organisations more efficient, robust and compliant, and in turn protect customers, investors and reputations more broadly (i.e., integrate theory with practice)

Students will gain knowledge of how to interact with regulators and enforcement authorities, including information sharing and self-reporting of internal failures

Essay 2000 words (33.3%)

Presentation 20 Minutes (66.6%)

 

Levi, M. (2012) ‘Financial Crimes’ in M. Tonry (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Crime and Public Policy

Gottschalk, P. (2010) ‘Categories of Financial Crime’, Journal of Financial Crime, 17(4): 441-458.

Parker, C. and Nielsen, V. (2011) Explaining Compliance: Explaining Compliance Business Responses to Regulation.

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