Advances in Technology for Auditing Firms: KPMG to Announce Deal with IBM Watson

A recent article in The Wall Street Journal discussed the technological improvements among auditing firms (KPMG in particular). KPMG is expected to announce an alliance with IBM to use their artificial-intelligence technology, IBM Watson, which will allow KPMG to audit all of the data for their clients rather than only samples of the data. The technology is not meant to replace human auditors, but will help them know where abnormalities may exist in the client’s books.

Fighting Fraud with Mathematical Weapons

According to a Wall Street Journal article, forensic accountants recently uncovered a several hundred thousand dollar fraud committed by employees at a national call center simply by “wielding mathematical weapons.” Using data analysis, they were able to identify a number of fraudulent refunds that call center employees were issuing. The find was critical to the company as it helped them discover where they were losing a lot of money.

Benford's Law

The forensic accountants who detected the fraud at the call center used a mathematical test known as Benford’s Law. Contrary to popular belief that there should be an even distribution in the starting digits of numbers, Benford’s Law says that “more numbers start with one than any other digit, followed by those that begin with two, then three, and so on,” and that “ones should account for 30% of leading digits, and each successive number should represent a progressively smaller proportion, with nines coming last, at under 5%.” In the case of the call center, the forensic team noticed an exceptionally large percentage of refund amounts where the starting digit was a four. It also happened to be that employees could issue refunds to customers up to $50 without needing additional supervision. By using Benford’s Law and investigating the transactions where the leading digit was a four, forensic accountants discovered a small number of operators at the call center “who had issued fraudulent refunds to themselves, friends and family totaling several hundred thousand dollars.”