Forensics in (Nearly) Everything

Several years ago, when interviewing a partner at one of the planet’s largest accounting firms, I was wowed by her hard-boiled  take on human nature. Evoking shades of  Brian Wansink’s Mindless Eating, my interviewee likened opportunities for embezzlement and other garden varieties of fraud to the temptation of having a candy dish constantly within arm’s reach. Just as it’s ultimately futile to resist those  M&Ms on your office desk, trusted employees, she noted, may have opportunities to embezzle as a continuing temptation. “. . . even nice people have been known to take inappropriate advantage of opportunities and gaps in control systems,” she emphasized.

My interviewee, in fact, was a practitioner of forensic accounting, a hot house growth area in public accounting. That’s not surprising, considering today’s bouillabaisse of motives, opportunities, and enabling technologies. And as the textbook covers below reveal, it’s not just accounting that offers a forensic career path. Count on it:  A forensic subdiscipline is coming to a profession near you.

 





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