formation gained from data analysis can be conveyed with the use of graphics or words. Locate an article within the Wall Street Journal where the author uses graphics and words to tell the story. Describe how you might better tailor the presentation if you were presenting the information to senior management at an accounting firm.

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Accountants Increasingly Use Data Analysis to Catch Fraud

When a team of forensic accountants began sifting through refunds issued by a national call center, something didnt add up: There were too many fours in the data. And it was up to the accountants to figure out why.

Until recently, such a subtle anomaly might have slipped by unnoticed. But with employee fraud costing the country an estimated $300 billion a year, forensic accountants are increasingly wielding mathematical weapons to catch cheats.

The future of forensic accounting lies in data analytics, said Timothy Hedley, a fraud expert at KPMG, the firm that did the call-center audit.

In the curious case of the call centers, several hundred operators across the country were authorized to issue refunds up to $50; anything larger required the permission of a supervisor. Each operator had processed more than 10,000 refunds over several years. With so much money going out the door, there was opportunity for theft, and KPMG decided to check the validity of the payments with a test called Benfords Law. According to Benfords Lawnamed for a Depression-era physicist who calculated the expected frequency of digits in lists of numbersmore numbers start with one than any other digit, followed by those that begin with two, then three and so on. The low digits are expected to occur far more frequently than the high digits, said Mark J. Nigrini, author of Benfords Law: Applications for Forensic Accounting, Auditing, and Fraud Detection and an accounting professor at West Virginia University. Its counterintuitive.

Most people expect digits to occur at about the same frequency. But according to Benfords Law, ones should account for 30% of leading digits, and each successive number should represent a progressively smaller proportion, with nines coming last, at under 5%.

In their call-center probe, Mr. Hedley and his colleagues stripped off the first digits of the refunds issued by each operator, calculated the frequencies and compared them with the expected distribution.

For certain people answering the phones, the refunds did not follow Benfords Law, Mr. Hedley said. In the four category, there was a huge spike. It led us to think they were giving out lots of refunds just below the $50 threshold.

Bingo.

The accountants identified a handful of operatorsfewer than a dozenwho had issued fraudulent refunds to themselves, friends and family totaling several hundred thousand dollars.

Thats a lot of $40 refunds. But before running the Benford analysis, neither the company nor its auditors had evidence of a problem.

Getting the accounting profession to adopt Benfords Law and similar tests has been a slow process, but Mr. Nigrini has spent two decades inculcating Benfords Lawin the accounting and auditing community, promoting it through articles, books and lectures.

It has the potential to add some big-time value, said Kurt Schulzke, an accounting professor at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. There has not been much innovation in the auditing profession in a long time, partly because they have ignored mathematics.

Now, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business emphasizes the importance of analytical capabilities. Off-the-shelf forensic-accounting software such as IDEA and ACL include Benfords Law tests. Even the Securities and Exchange Commission is reviewing how it can use such measures in its renewed efforts to police fraud.

Recently, at the invitation of the agency, Dan Amiram, an accounting professor at Columbia University, and his co-authors Zahn Bozanic of Ohio State University and Ethan Rouen, a doctoral student at Columbia, demonstrated their method for applying Benfords Law to publicly available data in companies income statements, balance sheets and statements of cash flow. For example, a look at Enronsnotorious fraudulent accounting from 2000 showed a clear variation from Benfords Law.

We decided to take a different approach, Mr. Amiram said. Those are the main financial statements that companies report.

Auditors, who are employed by companies to examine their accounts, are given free access to data that can reveal potential fraud. Investors and other individuals dont have that luxury. But, Mr. Amiram said, they all have the same goals: To make capital markets more efficient and make sure bad guys are not cheating anyone.

Benfords Law isnt a magic bullet. Its only one approach. It isnt appropriate for all data sets. And when it is a good tool for the job, it simply identifies anomalies in data, which must be explained with further investigation. In many cases, there are reasonable explanations for incongruities.

And with so much attention now paid to Benfords Law, it might occur to some hucksters to try to evade detection while still cheating. But Mr. Nigrini said it isnt that simple.

While you are doing your scheme, you dont know what the data look like, he said. Because you dont know what the population looks like while you are committing fraud, itsIts a little tricky to beat Benfords.