Application of Benford's Law for Fraud Detection in Financial Statements: Theoretical Review
- DOI
- 10.2991/icaat-16.2016.46How to use a DOI?
- Keywords
- Financial statements, Benford's law, profit manipulation
- Abstract
External auditors' ability to detect profit manipulations in the financial statements is limited. Non conformity with Benford's law gives indication of the risk that a data set contains fraud, but it does not give information which items are manipulated. Knowing profit and other financial targets set to the companies it is possible, treating profits deviation from Benford's law as probability, to identify potential financial statements with manipulated profits. In this field there has been a lot of research in different countries (New Zealand, USA, Finland, Japan, Germany and the others). The above-mentioned probability describing the profit manipulation risk would be very useful information for interested parties to decide whether identified financial statements require additional inspection. The aim of the current paper is to characterize Benford's law as tool for detecting financial statements with manipulated profits. The paper gives some ideas how to combine Benford's law and analytical tests.
- Copyright
- © 2016, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.
- Open Access
- This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).
Cite this article
TY - CONF AU - Mihkel Tammaru AU - Lehte Alver PY - 2016/12 DA - 2016/12 TI - Application of Benford's Law for Fraud Detection in Financial Statements: Theoretical Review BT - Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Accounting, Auditing, and Taxation (ICAAT 2016) PB - Atlantis Press SN - 2352-5428 UR - https://doi.org/10.2991/icaat-16.2016.46 DO - 10.2991/icaat-16.2016.46 ID - Tammaru2016/12 ER -