Government and public administration agencies were among the most defrauded organizations in 2008 and 2009, according to a new survey from the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners.

The organization studied 1,843 cases of occupational fraud that occurred worldwide between January 2008 and December 2009. Although private sector companies taken as a whole accounted for almost 75 percent of surveyed fraud cases while only 16 percent occurred at government agencies, government ranked third in fraud case frequency when compared to individual industry sectors.

The banking and financial services industry was the sector with the most reported cases of fraud, with 16.6 percent of reported cases; manufacturing was in second place at 10.7 percent, with government a close third at 9.9 percent.

Those numbers come with a  caveat, however; the ACFE cautions that the numbers only reflect which companies had certified fraud examiners investigate internal fraud cases within the last two years, and aren't an indication of which industries are more or less likely to be victimized by fraud.

The median reported loss of a government fraud was $91,000, a number that puts it on the low end of reported loss. The mining industry, although the victim of the least number of cases--.7 percent of the total--suffered median losses of $1 million. Technology companies, the subject of 3.6 percent of reported cases, suffered a median loss of $250,000.

When it comes to detecting fraud, government agencies had the highest rate of detection by tips and had a proportionately high rate of frauds caught through external audit, the survey finds.

For more:
- read the AFCE report (.pdf)

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