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BENFORD'S LAW: APPLICATIONS FOR FORENSIC ACCOUNTING, AUDITING, AND FRAUD DETECTION I ark J. Nigrini. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2012. 330 pages.
It's likely that most internal auditors have never heard of Benford or what his law contains, let alone how it could affect their profession. Benford was an engineer whose hobby from an early age was mathematics. Active before the invention of computers or even widespread use of calculators (he lived from 1883 to 1948), he performed thousands of calculations by hand to provide the support for the law in his name. Benford's Law essentially states, counterintuitively, that the sequence of multiple numbers from reallife sources is likely to be distributed in a specific, nonuniform way. In other words, it can expose the work of fraudsters and others guilty of ethical financial misdeeds who make up transactional numbers out of...