Forensic Analytics - (Wiley Corporate F&a) 2nd Edition by Mark J Nigrini (Hardcover)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

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.

From the Back Cover

The revised and updated Second Edition of Forensic Analytics offers an essential guide to detecting accounting fraud, biases, and errors in financial data. The author--a noted expert on the topic--explores the methods and techniques that investigators can use to identify anomalies in both corporate and public sector data. These anomalies include errors, biases, duplicates, number rounding, and omissions.

Forensic Analytics is written as a resource for professional accountants and auditors who typically lack a rigorous understanding of complex math and statistics. While the book is filled with fascinating vignettes and illustrations, it puts the focus on the quantitative and computing aspects of forensics. One lengthy chapter discusses how to detect financial statement misconduct through the use of various statistical approaches. The use of Benford's Law, descriptive statistics, correlation, and timeseries analysis are also reviewed. The book's data interrogation methods are based on common statistical techniques and the author's own research in the field. The author shows how to use Access and Excel in a forensic framework to help connect the dots and to reveal any red flags.

This revised Second Edition contains updates to Access and Excel that help detect anomalies and potential fraud, a review of the use of R, a flexible and free program that can do almost anything when it comes to data analysis, and many fresh fraud cases that complement the techniques presented. In addition, Forensic Analytics includes a companion website designed to help practice the methods and to use the data sets used in the book as examples.

Forensic Analytics provides the information and examples needed to help you hone your skills to become a forensics-related analytics expert in your organization.

About the Author

MARK J. NIGRINI, PHD, is a professor at West Virginia University where he teaches highly-rated, graduate-level accounting technology and forensic accounting classes.He has published extensively in academic and professional journals on various topics related to forensic analytics. His current research addresses forensic and continuous monitoring techniques and advanced theoretical work on Benford's Law.