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Creditor reliance on accounting‐based numbers as a persistent and traditional standard to assess a firm's financial soundness and viability suggests that the integrity of financial statements is essential to credit decisions. The purpose of this paper is to provide an approach to explore fraudulent financial reporting (FFR) via growing hierarchical self‐organizing map (GHSOM), an unsupervised neural network tool, to help capital providers evaluate the integrity of financial statements, and to facilitate analysis further to reach prudent credit decisions.

This paper develops a two‐stage approach: a classification stage that well trains the GHSOM to cluster the sample into subgroups with hierarchical relationship, and a pattern‐disclosure stage that uncovers patterns of the common FFR techniques and relevant risk indicators of each subgroup.

An application is conducted and its results show that the proposed two‐stage approach can help capital providers evaluate the reliability of financial statements and accounting numbers‐based decisions.

Following the SOM theories, it seems that common FFR techniques and relevant risk indicators extracted from the GHSOM clustering result are applicable to all samples clustered in the same leaf node (subgroup). This principle and any pre‐warning signal derived from the identified indicators can be applied to assessing the reliability of financial statements and forming a basis for further analysis in order to reach prudent decisions. The limitation of this paper is the subjective parameter setting of GHSOM.

This is the first application of GHSOM to financial data and demonstrates an alternative way to help capital providers such as lenders to evaluate the integrity of financial statements, a basis for further analysis to reach prudent decisions. The proposed approach could be applied to other scenarios that rely on accounting numbers as a basis for decisions.

The need for independent audit goes back to the agency theory, the theory of delegation of power and the issue of trust. Stakeholders delegate power to management to manage the business on their behalf, yet they face the risk of information asymmetry and management motivations to commit fraud. The main aim of having an independent auditor was therefore to reduce the risk of information asymmetry and fraudulent behaviour by management. Auditors are required by the International Auditing Standards to detect material fraud and error, and they are expected to have a duty of care for stakeholders. However, recently independent auditors, whether conducting private or public audit, have been scrutinised for failing to detect material fraud. There have been a lot of discussions in the literature about the role of private auditors in detecting fraud, but very little discussions about the role of public auditors in detecting fraud. This chapter will outline the difference between private audit and public audit; explain the legal liability of public auditors in relation to fraud detection; the role of public auditors in detecting fraud; and will critically review the root causes for auditors’ failure to detect fraud.

The purpose of this paper is to explore whether the choice of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) vs Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) is associated with the frequency and likelihood of accounting irregularities and fraud in US banks.

The authors examine the relationship between financial reporting standards and accounting irregularities in publicly listed US banks. Using a sample of 4,284 banks with accounting irregularities observed in the USA over the period of 1996–2014. They used logit model to estimate the likelihood of corporate misreporting having been committed in terms of accounting irregularities.

The authors show that banks that use US GAAP exhibit better operating performance than fraudulent banks that use IFRS except for certain variables. They also find that fraudulent banks are more likely to commit accounting irregularities when they have to follow IFRS and banks have relatively better bank performance.

Overall, the empirical findings result consistent with Kohlbeck and Warfield’s (2010) find that accounting standards are linked to fewer accounting irregularities.

In this study, accounting irregularities have a significant effect on bank performance during the Dodd–Frank period. It finds that banks that choose to use IFRS are more likely to have accounting irregularities and to engage in fraud.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the most relevant issues related to the impact of financial restatements in the dynamics of financial markets and identify several research gaps to be investigated in future research.

The methodology is based on a systematic review of the literature described by Tranfield et al. (2003). The final sample includes 47 academic papers published from 1996 to 2019.

Papers in this domain discuss three main topics: how the market prices the announcement of a financial restatement; how financial restatements affect the announcing firm’s cost of capital and how financial restatements affect firms’ reputation. There are several issues to explore in future research, including whether financial restatements affect the dynamics of financial markets in Europe, whether the market fully and promptly assimilates the information content of a restatement, the role of financial analysts’ information disclosures in this process or how regulators may improve the way they provide investors with timely information about firms’ restating problems.

There is always some degree of subjectivity in the definition of the keywords, search strings and selection criteria in a systematic review. These are all important aspects, as they delimitate the scope of the study and define the sample of papers to be reviewed.

The answers to the research questions identified in this paper may provide regulators with information to improve financial accounting and reporting standards and strengthen investors’ confidence in accounting information and the dynamics of financial markets.

This paper systematically reviews the relevant literature exploring the connection between financial restatements and the dynamics of financial markets. It contributes to the academic community by identifying several research questions that may impact the theory and practice related to accounting quality and capital markets.

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.

Part V analyzes the details of how to assess materiality. It first tackles qualitative versus quantitative criteria and the role of professional judgment. It then analyzes the selection of quantitative threshold, to expand to the choice of benchmarks. It contrasts the whole financial statements with subaggregates, line items, and components.

Specific sections contrast IASB, FASB, SEC, and other guidance on materiality applied to comparative information, interim reporting, and segment reporting.

The section on estimates mingles complex guidance coming from accounting, auditing, and internal control over financial reporting to explain how the management can improve its assessment of materiality concerning estimates.

After explaining the techniques to move from individual to cumulative misstatements, the part tackles verification ex post, and finally summarizes the intricacies of whether immaterial misstatements are permissible and their consequences.

Accounts manipulation has been the subject of research, discussion and even controversy in several countries including the USA, Canada, the U.K., Australia, Finland and France. The objective of this paper is to provide a comprehensive review of the literature and propose a conceptual framework for accounts manipulation. This framework is based on the possibility of wealth transfer between the different stake‐holders, and in practice, the target of the manipulation appears generally to be the earnings per share and the debt/equity ratio. The paper also describes the different actors involved and their potential gains and losses. We review the literature on the various techniques of accounts manipulation: earnings management, income smoothing, big bath accounting, creative accounting, and window‐dressing. The various definitions of all these, the main motivations behind their application and the research methodologies used are all examined. This study reveals that all the above techniques have common elements, but there are also important differences between them.

The London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) is considered to be the most important interest rate in finance upon which trillions in financial contracts are decided. In 2008, it was revealed that the LIBOR traders were rigging the interest rates. Yet, there is an unresolved question that regulators and banking officials did not address in their quest to seek answers to the fraud: Were the banks under financial strain when they underreported their LIBOR rates? To answer this question, the article posits that the pressure to meet market expectations led the banks to experience financial strain. Data were gathered from 2004 to 2008 on the banks that were involved in the fraud (fraud banks) and matched with a control group of non-fraud banks. The results from a logistic regression model found sufficient statistical evidence to support the claim that fraud will be greater in banks characterized by a higher level of organizational complexity. Variables such as percent of outside directors, board members on the audit committee, and number of employees were all found to be statistically significant. These variables may offer key insights into detecting and preventing frauds in banks.

Purpose: The study aims to explore the wider acceptance of blockchain technology and growing faith in this technology among all business domains to mitigate the chances of fraud in various sectors.

Design/Methodology/Approach: The authors focus on studies conducted during 2015–2022 using keywords such as blockchain, fraud detection and financial domain for Systematic Literature Review (SLR). The SLR approach entails two databases, namely, Scopus and IEEE Xplore, to seek relevant articles covering the effectiveness of blockchain technology in controlling financial fraud.

Findings: The findings of the research explored different types of business domains using blockchains in detecting fraud. They examined their effectiveness in other sectors such as insurance, banks, online transactions, real estate, credit card usage, etc.

Practical Implications: The results of this research highlight (1) the real-life applications of blockchain technology to secure the gateway for online transactions; (2) people from diverse backgrounds with different business objectives can strongly rely on blockchains to prevent fraud.

Originality/Value: The SLR conducted in this study assists in the identification of future avenues with practical implications, making researchers aware of the work so far carried out for checking the effectiveness of blockchain; however, it does not ignore the possibility of zero to less effectiveness in some businesses which is yet to be explored.