Forensic Acccounting Essay
Until recently, detecting fraud was thought to be a part of the responsibility of the accountant. Fraud was something the internal or external auditors were expected to guard against by their periodic audits. We now know that auditors can only check for compliance of a company’s books to the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAPs) and to company policy; therefore, a new category of accounting had to be established, one which revealed the fraud for companies with suspected fraudulent transactions. This new area of accounting is known as forensic accounting.
To fully understand the definition of forensic accounting, we can use parts of the definition of forensic medicine and accounting, both taken from Webster’s Dictionary, to produce a clear definition. Forensic medicine is a “science that deals with the relation and application of facts to legal problems.” Accounting is “the system of recording and summarizing business and financial transactions and analyzing, verifying, and reporting the result.” So, the combination of these two definitions would yield forensic accounting as an accounting method that deals with the relation and application of system used to record and summarize business and financial transactions to a legal problem. Within this area of accounting, there are two general categories of accountants or areas of practice. They are the following: litigation support specialists and investigative or fraud accountants (Crumbly, New Accountant). Read more…
