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This study aims to apply Benford’s law to examine the earnings management of companies listed in emerging ASEAN-5 countries: Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.

The authors follow Amiram et al. (2015) to measure deviations from Benford’s law of the first digits of numbers reported in financial statements. The authors use the Jones-modified performance-match model (Jones, 1991; Dechow et al., 1995; Kothari et al., 2005) to estimate accrual earnings management. The authors use a sample of 47,389 observations of listed companies in ASEAN-5 countries from 2006 to 2019. The authors also run ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions to test the hypotheses.

The authors find that the first digits of numbers reported in the financial statements of companies in the sample closely conform to Benford’s law. Further evidence shows that the deviation from Benford’s law is positively related to abnormal accruals. The relationship between deviation from Benford’s law and abnormal accruals is more pronounced for the post-international financial reporting standards adoption period. The results survive for some robustness checks.

The authors show that Benford’s law holds for financial statements of companies listed in the emerging ASEAN-5 countries.

Auditors could use Benford’s law as an analytical procedure to assess the risks of material misstatements. Also, other users could apply Benford’s law on audited financial statements to foresee undetected misstatements.

The authors provide original evidence that financial statements of ASEAN-5 countries follow Benford’s law. The evidence supports the usefulness of Benford’s law in developing markets.

Benford's Law is an empirical observation about the frequency of digits in a variety of naturally occurring data sets. Auditors and forensic scientists have used Benford's Law to detect erroneous data in accounting and legal usage. One well-known limitation is that Benford's Law fails when data have clear minimum and maximum values. Many kinds of education data, including assessment scores, typically include hard maximums and therefore do not meet the parametric assumptions of Benford's Law. This paper implements a transformation procedure which allows for assessment data to be compared to Benford's Law. As a case study, a data quality assessment of oral language scores from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten (ECLS-K) study is used and higher risk data segments detected. The same method could be used to evaluate other concerns, such as test fraud, or other bounded datasets.

After completion of the case study, the students will be able to understand the calculation of cost of individual sources of funds and cost of capital, examine various tools such as economic value added and cash value added analyses which help determining whether a company has added value to its shareholders or not and explore the application of Benford’s law and the Beneish M-score in detecting manipulation of numbers in financial statements.

Nimmy Jacob, a newly recruited research analyst with an equity research firm, was entrusted with tracking the “auto ancillary industry”, specifically “Minda Corporation Ltd” (MIL). MIL was a leading diversified auto components manufacturing companies in India. The company’s share price meteorically rose during February 2021–2022 (Figure 1). The company’s turnover over the past few years had grown at a compounded annual growth rate of 15% during the three preceding years. The company had in the recent past bought a 15% stake in another competitor, Pricol Ltd, for a consideration of INR 400 crores and previously had used joint ventures and acquisitions to scale up its operations. Jacob, apart from the conventional financial analysis, had to ascertain whether all the strategic decisions were adding value to the shareholders’ investments by exploring the various tools available for the same and also calculate the minimum expected rate of return for MIL. Jacob was apprehensive about the financial statements, although the numbers for the company were good. Jacob was skeptical about a high-growth company having the incentive to manipulate its earnings. Manipulations could be in the form of abnormal increase in accruals, inconsistency in expenses and high days of receivables. Therefore, Jacobs used certain analytics/statistical tools to detect any manipulation of numbers in the financial statements of the company and to ascertain apt findings about the company.

This case study is intended for discussion in corporate finance, financial reporting and analysis and financial analytics at Master of Business Administration/undergraduate level.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS1: Accounting and finance

This paper aims to examine how proportional appropriation systems affect the quality of financial reporting in entities controlled by local governments.

The authors examine this issue using the setting of Italian municipally owned entities (MOEs) following the implementation of a new accounting regulation that limits the spending power of the participating municipality when the owned entity reports losses. The authors apply Benford's law on net income figures using the Chi-square and Z-tests on the adjusted version of the Mean Absolute Deviation (MAD) criterion to spot any sign of low data quality. The sample, which consists of 2,120 MOEs, covers the years 2010–2019 and is evenly divided into the periods pre- and post-policy introduction.

Widespread data anomalies were detected following the introduction of the new regulation for MOEs controlled by local governments. Evidence is stronger for entities owned entirely by municipalities. The results suggest that the extent of data manipulation grows as the municipality's ownership stake increases, consistent with the hypothesis that a decrease in spending power through the appropriation of financial resources affects earnings management practices in municipally controlled entities.

This paper sheds light on government-based accounting policies by documenting evidence of somewhat inefficient responses by those responsible for the preparation of financial statements on behalf of municipally owned entities, and, accordingly, insights are provided to help review these policies so as to forestall even indirectly detrimental repercussions on public services.

This paper extends prior research in public-sector earnings management by being the first to test whether MOEs manipulate their earnings as a consequence of participating municipalities' reduced spending capability. Understanding factors influencing earnings management practices driven by governments, other than political incentives, is still an open issue.

Lebanon has faced one of the most severe financial and economic crises since the end of 2019. The practices of the Lebanese banks are blamed for dangerously exposing economic agents and precipitating the current financial collapse. This paper examines the patterns of manipulation of the 10 biggest banks before and after implementing the financial engineering mechanism.

The authors apply Benford law for the first and second positions of the reports of condition and income and four out of the six aspects of the CAMELS rating system (Capital Adequacy, Assets Quality, Management expertise, Earnings Strength, Liquidity and Sensitivity to the market) by excluding Management and Sensitivity. The deviations from BL frequencies are tested using Z-statistic and Chi-square tests.

Banks seem to have manipulated their Capital Adequacy, Liquidity and Assets Quality in the pre-financial engineering and considerably in the post-financial engineering periods. Fraudulent manipulations in the banking sector can distort depositors, shareholders and regulating authorities.

This study has many implications for governmental authorities, commercial banks, depositors, businesses, accounting and auditing firms, and policymakers. The Lebanese government needs to implement corrective fiscal and monetary policies and apply amendments to the bank secrecy and capital control law. The central bank should revamp its organizational structure, improve its disclosure practices and significantly reduce its ties to the government and the political elite.

The study findings suggest that the central bank should revamp its organizational structure, improve its disclosure practices and significantly reduce its ties to the government and the political elite.

The study is the first to examine the patterns of fraudulent manipulation in the Lebanese banking industry using Benford Law (BL).

Motivated by rapidly increasing CEO age in the USA, the purpose of this study is to analyze the effect of CEO age on financial reporting quality and consider the moderating role of clawback provisions.

This study uses a data set of 18,492 US firm-year observations from 2003 to 2019. Financial reporting quality is proxied with accruals-based and real activities earnings management measures, and with financial statement irregularities, measured by applying Benford’s law to financial statement line items. A number of sensitivity tests are conducted including the use of an instrumental variable.

The results provide evidence that financial statement irregularities are more prevalent when CEOs are older, and they suggest a complex relation between CEO age and real activities earnings management. The results also suggest that the effect of CEO age on financial reporting quality is moderated by the presence of clawback provisions which became mandatory for US-listed firms in October 2022.

This study is the first, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to consider the effect of CEO age on financial statement irregularities and earnings management. This study has important implications for stakeholders evaluating the determinants of financial reporting quality, for boards of directors considering CEO age limitations and for policymakers considering mandating clawback provisions, which recently occurred in the USA.

Using a qualitative grounded theory approach, this study explores the methods experienced external auditors use to detect fraudulent financial reporting (FFR) during standard audits.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 24 experienced external auditors to explore the methods they used to detect FFR successfully during standard external audits.

The authors find 58 methods used for FFR detection, out of which the following methods are frequently used and help in detecting more than one type of FFR: (1) specific analytical procedures, (2) positive confirmation, (3) understanding of the client's business and industry, (4) the inspection of specific documents, (5) a detailed analysis of the audit client's anti-fraud controls and (6) investigating tip-offs from suppliers, employees and customers.

Based on the grounded theory approach, the authors theorise that auditors must return to the basics and focus on specific audit procedures highlighted in this study for effective fraud detection.

The study provides practical guidance, including 58 methods used in audit practice to detect FFR. This knowledge can improve auditors' skills in detecting material misstatements due to fraud. Besides, analytical procedures and positive confirmation helped external auditors in this study detect all forms of FFR, yet they are overlooked in the external audit practice. Therefore, audit firms should emphasise the significance of these audit procedures in their professional audit training programmes. Audit regulators should advise auditors to consider positive confirmation instead of negative confirmation in financial audits to increase the likelihood of FFR detection. Moreover, audit standards (ISA 240 and SAS 99) should explicitly require auditors to conduct a detailed analysis of the client's anti-fraud controls.

This is the first study to identify actual, effective methods used by external auditors in detecting FFR during the ordinary course of an audit.

The purpose of this paper is to understand if forensic accounting techniques and tools could contribute to the deterrence of fraud in financial statements, considering the expertise of forensic accountant on ex post activities and that the traditional mechanisms to prevent this type of fraud have not been sufficient to stop the impact on companies, investors, auditors, employees and on society in general.

This research was carried out using a qualitative exploratory study with a phenomenological approach conducted through in-depth interviews with professional experts in the forensic field.

The findings confirm that the use of forensic accounting techniques and tools could contribute to the prevention of fraud in financial reporting not only when the risk of fraud has been materialized. Similar studies, about fraud prevention addressing the situation under a qualitative approach from the perspectives of its protagonists, have not been observed in the bibliographical review, so this research contributes to expanding the scientific research, the study and practice of forensic accounting.

From a business management perspective, this study contributes a paradigm shift from the traditional ex post forensic auditing activity toward an ex ante activity to improve management control systems within organizations anywhere in the world. Because this study is guided to prevent fraudulent financial statements, other fraud categories such as misappropriation or corruption could be addressed in other studies and various countries.

This study reviews and discusses the accounting literature that analyzes the role of auditors and enforcers in the context of fraud.

This literature review includes both qualitative and quantitative studies, based on the idea that the findings from different research paradigms can shed light on the complex interactions between different financial reporting controls. The authors use a mixed-methods research synthesis and select 64 accounting journal articles to analyze the main proxies for fraud, the stages of the fraud process under investigation and the roles played by auditors and enforcers.

The study highlights heterogeneity with respect to the terms and concepts used to capture the fraud phenomenon, a fragmentation in terms of the measures used in quantitative studies and a low level of detail in the fraud analysis. The review also shows a limited number of case studies and a lack of focus on the interaction and interplay between enforcers and auditors.

This study outlines directions for future accounting research on fraud.

The analysis underscores the need for the academic community, policymakers and practitioners to work together to prevent the destructive economic and social consequences of fraud in an increasingly complex and interconnected environment.

This study differs from previous literature reviews that focus on a single monitoring mechanism or deal with fraud in a broadly manner by discussing how the accounting literature addresses the roles and the complex interplay between enforcers and auditors in the context of accounting fraud.