- Hardcover: 480 pages
- Publisher: John Wiley & Sons (17 Jun 2011)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0470890460
- ISBN-13: 978-0470890462
- Product Dimensions: 25.4 x 17.8 x 4.3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 819,752 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
Forensic Analytics
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| |||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £23.60
Trade in Forensic Analytics: Methods and Techniques for Forensic Accounting Investigations (Wiley Corporate F&A) for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £23.60, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Plus, get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Product details |
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
"Golden, a recognized, practice management advisor and marketing specialist I social media use and strategy, particularly in the Certified Public Accountant field, has written an accessible, comprehensive guidebook to social media for professionals and their firms with an emphasis on the accounting and legal industries. She sets forth a one-stop, reference handbook that can be read from cover-to-cover or by chapter, as needed." ("Security Management")
Product Description
Discover how to detect fraud, biases, or errors in your data using Access or Excel
With over 300 images, Forensic Analytics reviews and shows how twenty substantive and rigorous tests can be used to detect fraud, errors, estimates, or biases in your data. For each test, the original data is shown with the steps needed to get to the final result. The tests range from high–level data overviews to assess the reasonableness of data, to highly focused tests that give small samples of highly suspicious transactions. These tests are relevant to your organization, whether small or large, for profit, nonprofit, or government–related.
- Demonstrates how to use Access, Excel, and PowerPoint in a forensic setting
- Explores use of statistical techniques such as Benford′s Law, descriptive statistics, correlation, and time–series analysis to detect fraud and errors
- Discusses the detection of financial statement fraud using various statistical approaches
- Explains how to score locations, agents, customers, or employees for fraud risk
- Shows you how to become the data analytics expert in your organization
Forensic Analytics shows how you can use Microsoft Access and Excel as your primary data interrogation tools to find exceptional, irregular, and anomalous records.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
0 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
I had to stop reading it in the middle, it definitively proved a time waster for several reasons:
1) I tried to find the purpose to use Access for analytical and audit review: ACL is much more productive in my view, so why bother? For instance, 4 chapters about Bendford Law can be put in practice in a few minutes using ACL Bendford feature.
2) There is no practical description about the Excel new pivot table and statistical features, and it totally misses the new Excel 2010 features (although the book is issued in 2011).
3) Examples of analytical review cover "oil consumption in a US State" and "poll results in California"... not really practical for our usual auditing reviews.
4) Writing style is confusing and overly academic, totally lacking any humor.
Typical university book, not adapted to practical investigations.
1) I tried to find the purpose to use Access for analytical and audit review: ACL is much more productive in my view, so why bother? For instance, 4 chapters about Bendford Law can be put in practice in a few minutes using ACL Bendford feature.
2) There is no practical description about the Excel new pivot table and statistical features, and it totally misses the new Excel 2010 features (although the book is issued in 2011).
3) Examples of analytical review cover "oil consumption in a US State" and "poll results in California"... not really practical for our usual auditing reviews.
4) Writing style is confusing and overly academic, totally lacking any humor.
Typical university book, not adapted to practical investigations.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
5 reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Helpful for forensic testing using Excel and Access
21 Jun 2011
Format:Hardcover
I found this to be a helpful book. The data analysis tests in Forensic Accounting can be used as high-level reasonableness tests to determine whether private or public sector data is free of fraud, errors or biases. While the tests can't guarantee that everything is clean and correct, they will detect the larger and more obvious errors. The author starts with some high-level overview tests and then drills deeper into the data to find irregular patterns. The Relative Size Factor tests and the Same-Same-Different test have been used with much success in detecting problems with accounts payable data.
Benford's Law fans will not be disappointed--the book includes four full chapters on Benford's Law and it is also covered in three other chapters. The final chapter on purchasing card fraud has interesting examples of actual fraud, an Excel dashboard, and an example of a real analysis of real company data. The book has tests that will be new and valuable to seasoned forensic accountants as well as some basic tests that will be immediately usable for beginners. If you have Excel or Access and your own data, then you could probably use many of the tests in the book right away. This book shows how to run most of the tests in both programs. It should be useful to forensic accountants, auditors, and other accounting and finance types who work with data.
Benford's Law fans will not be disappointed--the book includes four full chapters on Benford's Law and it is also covered in three other chapters. The final chapter on purchasing card fraud has interesting examples of actual fraud, an Excel dashboard, and an example of a real analysis of real company data. The book has tests that will be new and valuable to seasoned forensic accountants as well as some basic tests that will be immediately usable for beginners. If you have Excel or Access and your own data, then you could probably use many of the tests in the book right away. This book shows how to run most of the tests in both programs. It should be useful to forensic accountants, auditors, and other accounting and finance types who work with data.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Forensics for Purchasing Card Administrators
1 Oct 2011
Format:Hardcover
Dr. Nigrini's book on forensic analytics is nothing short of amazing especially for those of us that haven't used statistics or analysis since high school or college. I'll admit that when I first received the book I was disappointed that there was only one chapter (18) that deals specifically with purchasing cards (PCards). However, as I began to read the book I realized that all of the other chapters help you understand your PCard records and are explanation of tools to help you perform analysis.
The book covers using MS Access, Excel and PowerPoint for forensic investigation or presentation of forensic analysis. The author also includes many tests that you can apply to look for fraud (misuse/abuse). You also have access to a website that has a lot of examples and data from the various chapters to help you understand the text.
Reading the book was my first introduction in using Benford's Law and applying it to card data. It was interesting to see my data reviewed with Benford's Law. I haven't attempted to apply the other tests to my data yet, but will as I complete reading the book.
If you are a Purchasing Card Administrator interested in mitigating risk, this is a book that can help you understand how to review the data.
The book covers using MS Access, Excel and PowerPoint for forensic investigation or presentation of forensic analysis. The author also includes many tests that you can apply to look for fraud (misuse/abuse). You also have access to a website that has a lot of examples and data from the various chapters to help you understand the text.
Reading the book was my first introduction in using Benford's Law and applying it to card data. It was interesting to see my data reviewed with Benford's Law. I haven't attempted to apply the other tests to my data yet, but will as I complete reading the book.
If you are a Purchasing Card Administrator interested in mitigating risk, this is a book that can help you understand how to review the data.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
A very good review of the topic
5 Mar 2012
Format:Kindle Edition
Forensic Analytics: Methods and Techniques for Forensic Accounting Investigations (Wiley Corporate F&A)I bought this book to help me with a course I was about to run on detecting fraud. I know Excel very well, I know Access a bit, I am very familiar with statistics. I have been a fan of Benford's Law for several years and have even had articles on the topic published.
Nevertheless, I knew that Dr Nigrini was one of THE leading lights in this topic and I have to say I was not disappointed. I bought the Kindle version of the book so I have to say that I cannot comment on the layout of the book and so on because Kindles are not the best place to see perfect layouts!
The contents are good and the progression of topics is good and logical. I have to say, however, that personally speaking, I didn't need the information on Access and PowerPoint but I can see why they were included.
I did learn a few things from this systematic study of forensic analytics and was pleased to see Dr Nigrini's views on how to deal with results from a Benford's Law analysis. Learning these things made my own understanding and presentations a little better.
I have to say that I didn't have a lot of time to consider the mantissa arc and Kolmogorov-Smirnoff tests but I liked the correlation test: nice, simple and easy to use and explain.
There is a batch of cases to work on, heating oil sales, stock market information and construction data. There is even a very large database of invoice information to work with (approx 189,000 invoices) that will stretch your Excel resources but which will be useful for anyone wanting to work with a real data set.
Overall I found the explanations nice and clear and for anyone looking for a good introduction to the topic, this is a good start.
Nevertheless, I knew that Dr Nigrini was one of THE leading lights in this topic and I have to say I was not disappointed. I bought the Kindle version of the book so I have to say that I cannot comment on the layout of the book and so on because Kindles are not the best place to see perfect layouts!
The contents are good and the progression of topics is good and logical. I have to say, however, that personally speaking, I didn't need the information on Access and PowerPoint but I can see why they were included.
I did learn a few things from this systematic study of forensic analytics and was pleased to see Dr Nigrini's views on how to deal with results from a Benford's Law analysis. Learning these things made my own understanding and presentations a little better.
I have to say that I didn't have a lot of time to consider the mantissa arc and Kolmogorov-Smirnoff tests but I liked the correlation test: nice, simple and easy to use and explain.
There is a batch of cases to work on, heating oil sales, stock market information and construction data. There is even a very large database of invoice information to work with (approx 189,000 invoices) that will stretch your Excel resources but which will be useful for anyone wanting to work with a real data set.
Overall I found the explanations nice and clear and for anyone looking for a good introduction to the topic, this is a good start.
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
