1. ¹Professor of Public Services Management, Liverpool Business School, Liverpool John Moores University; and Co-ordinator of the Unit for the Study of White-Collar Crime
2. ²Detective Chief Inspector, Merseyside Police
3. ³Intelligence analyst, WorkCover Corporation, South Australia

Abstract

This article seeks to study the restraints and problems in combating insurance fraud by presenting findings from two studies into aspects of policing fraud by the insurance industry—internal responses to fraud within the industry and external relationships with the police. It then looks at the responses to fraud currently being pursued by the industry's representative body in the context of similar developments elsewhere in the public and the private sectors. The article concludes that the whole may have to be more effective than the sums of the parts in that an industry-wide- based response to fraud would appear to be the necessary level of activity to drive forward a co-operative approach to dealing with fraud by individual companies.