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The theoretical background to the question set
The analysis began from the premise that a person who commits financial crime involving a financial institution recognises that his actions are not consistent with the relationship that the financial institution expects. This is a relatively broad concept and covers fraud against the institution and using the institution to hold, process or transfer money related to illegal activity including terrorism or proceeds of crime. We recognised that it was not necessary, from the point of view of the objectives of RV1™, to differentiate between different types of financial criminal. Subsequent work, which is not incorporated into RV1™, has indicated a direction for future research which may result in identifying those who have a propensity to sympathise with the principles of terrorism. The initial background theory was based on the work of Abraham Maslow and his "Hierarchy of Needs". This model of human motivation posits that all human beings have a spectrum of needs that must be satisfied if they are to become fully functional human beings. Initial development of the Risk Values methodology involved identifying what would motivate a person in each of the 3 main Maslovian groups to commit the crime of money laundering. It very quickly became apparent that 2 of the 3 groups would be unlikely to commit this type of crime. This allowed us to develop a set of questions that would identify people into just 3 groups; so that the majority of respondents (2 out of 3) could be regarded as "unlikely to commit the crime". The next step was to identify the people within the remaining group who would be "most likely" to commit this type of crime. A review of literature once again revealed that a combination of a high need for success (over-riding ambition), a propensity for "cutting corners" in a financial sense, a low degree of general fear of "being found out" and a high degree of discontent with their present status was necessary for a planned and sustained financial crime like money laundering. This would allocate a low value to a substantial proportion of the remaining group. The next stage was to identify questions that would identity the differences between this remaining set of people, who still look like many of the most honestly ambitious people in any society, and potentially good customers for financial institutions, and those people who were less than morally honest in all facets of their life. We found that we had high correlations between questions we had already asked and this factor. This lead us propose a greater weight in the resulting algorithm to certain questions. In the initial research we had noted a seeming relationship between models of moral and social developmental psychology. The two most relevant people in these fields, in terms of this product development stage of creation of a product to identify the potential money launderer, etc., were determined to be Lawrence Kohlberg (moral psychology) and Erik Erikson (social psychology and development). Our eventual understanding was, and this is corroborated by Criminology statistics and Criminal Psychology insights, that this type of crime is a developmentally dependent type of crime, i.e. one likely to "grown" into, and "grown" out of, at fairly predictable stages of development, morally, psychologically and chronologically. Thus a profile was possible. As a result a set of questions could be developed to measure the stage of development any respondent was in at the time the questionnaire was given. The three core models had significant degrees of overlap. This enabled us to rely quite heavily on our long-term knowledge of Maslovian research, thereby creating a very robust and segmented questionnaire with a minimum of questions. The resulting question set and algorithm now gives immediate and long term indicators of respondents who are more likely to become abusers of financial facilities, of which fraud and money laundering are just the more serious end of a continuum of abuse. |
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