‘Fraud’ is traditionally subdivided into horizontal fraud on the one hand, and vertical fraud on the other hand. Vertical fraud is the traditional domain of the public police and the other actors in the penal chain. Horizontal fraud, however, has principally been policed (and adjudicated) by private institutions for years. Recently in Belgium, this traditional division of tasks has been questioned, and several legal initiatives have been introduced to remedy the merely private approach of this phenomenon. In 2010,
a small scale, exploratory study on the opinions and views of eight magistrates on the legal obligation to report fraud was commissioned by the IFA (Institute for Forensic Auditors). In this article, we aim to discuss the results of this study by analyzing the results of these interviews, and discuss whether the initiative, taken by the Belgian Minister of Interior, can be seen as rolling the state back in and/or a nationalization of the private justice issue. We conclude from this limited empirical research that
a partial modeling of private investigations to public investigations could be useful to increase the (perception of) quality of private investigations in the framework of a public investigation.

Keywords
Fraud, private investigation, forensic accountant, reporting unit, public-private cooperation