ETHICAL RESPONSIBILITY AS PREVENTIVE MECHANISM AGAINST FINANCIAL FRAUD

Financial fraud continues to represent one of the most costly and destabilising forms of organisational misconduct,
because it simultaneously affects assets, the credibility of reporting, investor confidence and the proper functioning of markets.
Although classical literature explains the emergence of fraud through the combination of pressure, opportunity and rationalisation,
this article argues that ethical responsibility must be understood as a central preventive mechanism, capable of intervening before
damage materialises. From this perspective, ethics is not treated as a rhetorical ornament of governance, but as a normative
infrastructure that influences the quality of decisions, internal culture, the willingness to report irregularities and the robustness of
professional control. The analysis starts from recent institutional reports and continues with the literature on fraud theory and
investigative accounting in order to demonstrate that major financial frauds usually arise where procedural weaknesses combine
with moral ambiguity and with the organisation’s inability to protect economic truth. Within this framework, the article argues that
ethical responsibility acts preventively by limiting the rationalisation of fraud, by strengthening a climate of openness and
professional dissent, by increasing the quality of governance and by consolidating the role of financial professionals and auditors as
guardians of the public interest. The case study dedicated to Wirecard illustrates, in concrete terms, how ignored warnings,
insufficient checks and ethical formalism can transform early signals into financial collapse. The central conclusion is that the
prevention of financial fraud begins before investigation and at a deeper level than compliance, namely in the organisation’s
capacity to transform integrity from declaration into verifiable practice and from symbolic value into an effective criterion of
decision making.