Benford's Law: Applications for Forensic Accounting, Auditing, and Fraud Detection

There are hidden patterns in the chaos that we know as data. In the 1930s, the physicist Frank Benford found that there were predictable patterns to the digits in the numbers in tabulated data. For many years, this little secret was known to only a few people, made up mainly of mathematicians and the Benford family. In the 1990s, the accountant Mark Nigrini first advocated the use of Benford's Law as a test for fraud and of data integrity. With 250 tables and figures dealing with 50 data se...