Biases in anti-money laundering process sanctioning : The top executives auditors, and baords characteristics in Swedish accounting and auditing firms

Money laundering has over time been recognized to develop. The illegal process has many outcomes, where many aspects connected to society are negatively affected. It has been shown that the whole globe has issues with money being laundered. Anti-money laundering is explained to be the process against this illegal process. In Sweden, many kinds of organizations have responsibilities connected to hindering money laundering, including for instance accounting and auditing firms. This study’s aim was to investigate if there is a relationship between the characteristics of the top executives, auditors, and boards in accounting and auditing firms and the sanctioning amounts connected to insufficient AML processes. In this study, the observations were from 2018-2025, and 80 Swedish accounting and auditing firms that have received sanctions were included. The County Administrative Board, FAR online and Bolagsfakta were utilized to collect the data. Furthermore, OLS regression was utilized to test the hypotheses connected to the three research questions in this study. The results found that the top executive gender and age as well as the composition of the board has an insignificant positive relationship with the sanctioning ratio. Which indicates that the sanctioning ratio is higher for top executives that are female and older, as well as when more females are on the board. Further results displayed that auditor gender have a significant negative relationship with the sanctioning ratio, showing that female auditors receive a lower sanctioning ratio for insufficient anti-money laundering processes. The findings in this study shows both alignment and contradictions with earlier research. Furthermore, the insignificant positive relationships could indicate support for social identity theory, while less indication of support for institutional and prospect theory. The found significant results can be explained by social identity theory, rather than being explained by institutional and prospect theory.