Abstract:

After over twenty years of establishment, the public evaluation of EFCC's performance and level
of innovative is an imperative, hence this paper on Port Harcourt residents' perception of EFCC's
performance and innovativeness. The objectives, which formed the research questions were to
determine the residents’ perception of EFCC's performance with regard to its statutory role and to
find out their assessments of the commission’s innovativeness. The Social judgement theory by
Muzafer Sherif, Carolyn Sherif and Carl Hovland (1961) was adopted for the study. Survey design
was adopted because it yields itself the both quantitative and quantitative techniques. The
population for the study was put at 1,005,115. The instrument for data collection was the
questionnaire. Data analysis was done using mode and binomial test of proportion of Z-
approximations. The study concluded that Port Harcourt residents’ perception of EFCC was bi-
directional, but a significant proportion of the people were on the left side of the divide. It is
therefore, recommended that EFCC should do more in the areas of transparency and neutrality, as
well as, to adopt innovative strategies to match the evolving sophistication in financial and
economic crimes