Articles

Fear Not The Software: Scattergraphing

Posted on Aug 12, 2006

By Richard B. Lanza, CFE, CPA, PMP

Quickly finding needles in the haystack

Sometimes a fraud examination appears daunting because of an extensive amount of data that needs to be sifted to identify exceptions. In one instance, a company was at risk for over reporting revenue on its financial statements. Because this was a new audit engagement, these overstatements may have existed in the prior year as well as the current year. As usual, we had limited time to complete the audit so everyone involved wanted answers fast. What added to the pressure was the fact that there were more than 5,700 customer accounts and any one of them could have been a fraudulent reporting of revenue.