Litigation

The Future of Financial Investigations

By Tracy Coenen

From my Thought Leadership series at Securities Docket:

What is at the heart of almost every securities case, whether the case is pursued by the government or a private party? It is a trail of money. The difficulty in prosecuting or defending a securities case is the fact that there is voluminous financial data that must be culled, analyzed, and presented in a way that proves the case.

For the last three decades, securities and financial fraud cases have been evaluated by forensic accountants using manual processes. The financial investigators compared accounting data with source documents, ultimately trying to prove the source and use of funds.

The world of forensic accounting is moving in a new direction, however. Fraud investigators are slowly beginning to use technology to analyze large volumes of financial data much faster, more efficiently, and more accurately than they have been able to do using traditional investigative techniques. As discussed in this paper, when a tried and true method of investigating financial crimes and allegations of fraud is combined with the latest technology, extraordinary results are possible.

Read the whole article at Securities Docket.

Full post as published by The FRAUDfiles Blog on September 14, 2010 (boomark / email).