Become the forensic analytics expert in your organization using
effective and efficient data analysis tests to find anomalies, biases,
and potential fraud--the updated new edition
Forensic Analytics reviews the methods and techniques that forensic
accountants can use to detect intentional and unintentional errors,
fraud, and biases. This updated second edition shows accountants and
auditors how analyzing their corporate or public sector data can
highlight transactions, balances, or subsets of transactions or balances
in need of attention. These tests are made up of a set of initial
high-level overview tests followed by a series of more focused tests.
These focused tests use a variety of quantitative methods including
Benford's Law, outlier detection, the detection of duplicates, a
comparison to benchmarks, time-series methods, risk-scoring, and
sometimes simply statistical logic. The tests in the new edition include
the newly developed vector variation score that quantifies the change in
an array of data from one period to the next. The goals of the tests are
to either produce a small sample of suspicious transactions, a small set
of transaction groups, or a risk score related to individual
transactions or a group of items.
The new edition includes over two hundred figures. Each chapter, where
applicable, includes one or more cases showing how the tests under
discussion could have detected the fraud or anomalies. The new edition
also includes two chapters each describing multi-million-dollar fraud
schemes and the insights that can be learned from those examples. These
interesting real-world examples help to make the text accessible and
understandable for accounting professionals and accounting students
without rigorous backgrounds in mathematics and statistics. Emphasizing
practical applications, the new edition shows how to use either Excel or
Access to run these analytics tests. The book also has some coverage on
using Minitab, IDEA, R, and Tableau to run forensic-focused tests. The
use of SAS and Power BI rounds out the software coverage. The software
screenshots use the latest versions of the software available at the
time of writing. This authoritative book:
- Describes the use of statistically-based techniques including
Benford's Law, descriptive statistics, and the vector variation score
to detect errors and anomalies
- Shows how to run most of the tests in Access and Excel, and other data
analysis software packages for a small sample of the tests
- Applies the tests under review in each chapter to the same purchasing
card data from a government entity
- Includes interesting cases studies throughout that are linked to the
tests being reviewed.
- Includes two comprehensive case studies where data analytics could
have detected the frauds before they reached multi-million-dollar
levels
- Includes a continually-updated companion website with the data sets
used in the chapters, the queries used in the chapters, extra coverage
of some topics or cases, end of chapter questions, and end of chapter
cases.
Written by a prominent educator and researcher in forensic accounting
and auditing, the new edition of Forensic Analytics: Methods and
Techniques for Forensic Accounting Investigations is an essential
resource for forensic accountants, auditors, comptrollers, fraud
investigators, and graduate students.
