Forensic Analytics: Methods and Techniques for Forensic Accounting Investigations

Discover how to detect fraud, biases, or errors in your data using Access or Excel

Every fraud or error changes your data in some way or another. The challenge is to find those needles in the haystack. Forensic Analytics shows how you can use Microsoft Access and Excel as your primary interrogation tools to find exceptional, irregular, and anomalous transactions.

Forensic Analytics reveals how you can:

• Use Access, Excel, and PowerPoint in a forensic setting

• Use statistical techniques such as Benford's Law, correlation, and time-series analysis to detect fraud and errors

• Detect financial statement fraud using one of several statistical approaches

• Score divisions, locations, agents, or customers for fraud risk

• Become the data analytics expert in your organization

With over 300 images, Forensic Analytics reviews and shows how twenty tests can be used to detect fraud, errors, or biases in your data. For each test, the original data is shown together with the steps needed to get to the final result. The tests range from thorough overviews to assess the reasonableness of data, to highly focused tests that give small samples of highly suspicious transactions. Some tests incorporate time and changes over time while other tests look for irregular patterns, excessively large amounts, or excessive duplications. The tests are relevant to any kind or size organization, whether small or large, nonprofit, or government-related.