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

This module teaches you about the processes and approaches that underpin the production of data, evidence and intelligence on financial crime and compliance, how you can go about undertaking your own empirical research on compliance, and how you can evaluate how robust and credible varying sorts of data are for informing company policies and strategies. This unit will enhance your knowledge, skills and confidence for designing, conducting and interpreting evidence-based research to complement the subject matter knowledge accumulated from your career experience and practice in compliance. On the unit we will introduce you to methods for measuring and understanding compliance related issues, as well as tools for evaluating whether policies on financial crime and compliance actually ‘work’ in practice, what the impacts of any given policy are, and how you can ascertain whether such insights are robust and reliable (i.e., evidence-based policies vs. policy-based evidence). Your organisations will benefit from having senior managers with knowledge and expertise to ensure company policies and strategies are problem-oriented, evidence-based and evaluated over time to ensure optimum efficiency and impact.

Those with senior management functions will benefit from learning how to ‘make sense’ of social scientific data and evidence, and to be critical in how you scrutinise research findings before evaluating whether they can form the basis of business strategies or feed into their decision-making responsibilities. In these terms, you will learn about the process of undertaking systematic and rigorous research that will enable you to design and direct the creation of evidence and intelligence for your business, as well as to interpret and assess the research findings of academics, NGOs and other social research outputs that may be of use to your business strategies and policies. This module enables you to bridge the gap between practice and science, providing you with the concepts, knowledge and ideas for interacting with statistics and research findings in the area of governance, compliance and financial crime. In addition, you will systematically acquire and understand a substantial body of knowledge which is at the forefront of an academic discipline or area of professional practice.

The module will provide the foundation for undertaking or understanding original empirical research (using quantitative and/or qualitative methodologies) that can form the basis of the (group) dissertation or for undertaking future independent research projects within your organisations. Such knowledge might also be useful for those looking to undertake a more advanced research degree (e.g., PhD, ProfDoc).

 

CRIM70023 FCC Online Condition (Programme 10177)

The unit aims to teach students about the processes and approaches that underpin the production of data, evidence and intelligence on financial crime and compliance, how you can go about undertaking your own empirical research on compliance, and how you can evaluate how robust and credible varying sorts of data are for informing company policies and strategies.

Syllabus

Week 1: Identifying Researchable Financial Crime and Compliance Questions

Week 2: Research Design and Strategy for Financial Crime and Compliance Research

Week 3: Designs and Methods for FCC Research

Week 4: Measuring Compliance – The Challenges

Week 5: Consolidation Week

Week 6: Quantitative Approaches to Compliance Research

Week 7: Qualitative Approaches to Compliance Research

Week 8: Mixed Strategy Research and Compliance

Week 9: Making Sense of Compliance Data – Corruption Statistics and Illicit Financial Flows

Week 10: Revision Week

Online, blended learning on the TNE (Transnational Education) e-learning platform with three optional residential visit 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 should be able to identify researchable questions for undertaking empirical research on financial crime and compliance

Student should be able to appraise key debates in how we go about measuring and understanding compliance

Student should be able to assess and critique compliance data to determine their credibility and use for business compliance policies

Research Proposal 1000 words (30%)

Research Design 2500 words (70%)

Sayer, A. (2010) Method in Social Science Research. London: Routledge

Rorie, M. and van Rooij, B. (2022) (eds) Measuring Compliance: Assessing Corporate Crime and Misconduct Prevention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

For Information and advice on Link2Lists reading list software, see: http://www.library.manchester.ac.uk/academicsupport/informationandadviceonlink2listsreadinglistsoftware/