This assessment task is designed to enhance your investigative skills, to collate, analysis and report on statistical data in relation to fraud offences.

The Executive Directors have advised that the following fraud offences have been more prevalent this year:

- Internet fraud
- Identity fraud
- Centrelink fraud
- Medicare fraud
- Credit card fraud

In response to this, you are to prepare a research report on ONE of these topics.

You may report on information that overlaps from other topics if it supports your research findings.

You are to conduct research using the internet or alternative sources and see what information you can gather about your chosen topic.

Importantly, your research MUST include statistical information about which you can conduct a discussion. This means that you should gather ‘numbers' in relation to your topic, for example, find the estimated monetary value of suspected incidents of fraud reviewed by Centrelink in 2009-10. You should then be able to use these statistics to conduct a discussion about the topic.

The focus of the report is on collecting data, analysing data and presenting outcomes.

You may consider the following questions to assist you with your research:

1. What is your topic?

2. Why would the Executive Directors be addressing this issue?

3. What is the media exposure on this issue?

4. What are the statistics associated with this issue for any given year?

5. What do the statistics tell the public about this issue?

6. Are there conflicting statistics from different sources, and if so, how do you know what is correct?

7. How can you use the statistics to implement change related to this issue? For example, do the number of internal reports of fraud by staff support whistleblowing within the workplace?

Given that this is a report you may use graphs, tables or pictures to support your argument.

Minimum word count: 2000 words