Forensic Accounting Techniques and Financial Crime Prevention in State Hospital Board Management: A Study of Selected States in South Western Nigeria

Résumé fourni par la source

Financial crimes within state hospital board management in Nigeria represent a particularly damaging form of public-sector malfeasance: funds diverted or misapplied in public secondary health facilities directly erode healthcare delivery capacity, compromise patient outcomes, and undermine the institutional credibility of state Hospitals Management Boards (HMBs). The six states of South Western Nigeria — Lagos, Ogun, Oyo, Osun, Ondo, and Ekiti — collectively operate a network of state-owned secondary health facilities whose financial governance structures, encompassing the finance and accounts departments, internal audit units, and ministerial oversight committees of their respective HMBs, are tasked with safeguarding significant volumes of recurrent and capital expenditure as well as internally generated revenue from user fees and health insurance reimbursements. Yet financial crime, including payroll fraud, pharmaceutical procurement inflation, user-fee diversion, and ghost-worker schemes, continues to be documented across comparable Nigerian state health boards. This paper examines the relationship between forensic accounting techniques and financial crime prevention in the management of state Hospital Boards in South Western Nigeria, drawing on empirical evidence from Nigerian public-sector forensic accounting studies, health-sector specific fraud studies, and South Western Nigerian forensic accounting literature. The paper adopts a desk-based, literature-synthesis methodology anchored on White Collar Crime Theory (Sutherland, 1949), Fraud Triangle Theory (Cressey, 1953), and Agency Theory (Jensen & Meckling, 1976). The synthesised empirical evidence establishes a significant positive relationship between the application of forensic accounting techniques — principally data mining and analytics, documentary evidence examination, investigative and auditing skills, and Benford's Law-based digital analysis — and the prevention and detection of financial crime in Nigerian public-sector entities, including health-sector organisations. Constraints including forensic specialist shortages, weak internal control systems, limited audit independence, and poor institutionalisation of forensic practice are found to limit the long-run impact of technique adoption. The paper concludes that the systematic embedding of forensic accounting capability within South Western Nigerian state HMB financial governance structures offers a robust, evidence-based strategy for curbing financial crime, and recommends mandatory forensic accounting units, inter-agency collaboration with the EFCC and ICPC, and dedicated forensic training for HMB finance and audit staff.

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