Management speak holds clues to deception

The language used by company CEOs and top-level management – particularly the tone and choice of words in financial reports – holds clues to possible deceptive conduct, according to research.

In a paper just published by the Journal of Business Ethics, Professor Russell Craig, Head of Victoria University's School of Accounting and Finance, and his colleagues Tony Mortensen (University of Canterbury) and Shefali Iyer (Deloitte, NZ), argue that reports and letters written by fraudulent company bosses contain distinctive linguistic tendencies. Read the rest of 'Management speak holds clues to deception' at the VU website