FORENSIC ACCOUNTING FRAUD ANALYTICS

COURSE OBJECTIVES

• Understand the importance and concept of forensic accounting and fraud analytics
• Use a variety of descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytical models to evaluate data authenticity and identify anomalies.
• Apply data analytics methods through the use of spreadsheets and R to assist in the external and internal audit processes.
• Have necessary skills to develop a systematic way to analyze a large accounting data from defining the problem and data collection stage to the implementation stage.

FOCAL POINTS

• We will provide some introductory details about the concepts of forensic accounting, auditing, and fraud.
• We will organize data sets in Excel and R to better facilitate fraud analytics. We will discuss about handling missing values, treatment of outliers, standardizing data, etc. Higher level analysis such as reducing the number of dimensions in the data set by conducting principal component analysis will also be discussed.
• We will discuss about Benford’s Law and statistical conformity of data sets to Benford’s Distribution. We will also deal with some other fraud detection tests that have connection to Benford’s Law.
• Further descriptive analytics techniques will be discussed next. Namely we will learn about basic data mining techniques such as clustering and association rules and relate the topics to fraud detection.
• We will then put our attention to predictive analytics techniques. This part will take a large amount of time as we will be discussing multiple linear regression, logistic regression, decision trees, support vector machines, and neural networks to identify erroneous or fraudulent records in our data sets. We will first explain the topics in general, then relate them to fraud detection, and finally work on real data sets to implement the methods that we learned.
• We will also discuss some of the recent scientific articles on fraud analytics. We will end the course with student project presentations

WHO SHOULD ATTEND

• Procurement officers
• Accountants
• Auditors
• Police officers
• Inspectors

DATES, VENUES AND PROGRAMME FEES