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By: Uchenna Ani-okoye

A Basic Guide to Forensic Accounting

While your traditional accountant’s responsibilities lie with looking after numbers, a forensic accountant’s duty is to look beyond these numbers. In order for them to do this, they will need to possess a considerable amount of knowledge on auditing, accounting, legal practices and investigation. These professionals are highly proficient and indispensable at ensuring that financial statements and other records reflect what they are supposed to. They also work to mitigating risks of any future fraudulent activities by implementing and recommending system controls that are very stringent through various enterprise risk management types and audit committee advisory services. They will also offer discover assistance and expert witness testimonies during trials.

In most cases they are hired to work on acquisitions and corporate mergers (verifying inventories and valuating business assets), divorces (determining child support payments and equitable distribution of income), and personal injury claims (calculating losses and economic damages). Other assignments that are fairly common for them include investigating masters such as employee theft; identify theft, bankruptcy claims, security fraud and underwriting issues.

Forensic accounting is currently one of the fastest growing fields in accounting, and it has been able to draw a significant amount of attention to itself with the proliferation of white-collar crimes like fraud, money laundering and embezzlement. The Enron accounting scandal in the year 2001 generated a lot of media coverage, and many accountants were actively involved in tracking the activities of global terrorists after the 9/11 terror attack.

Before you can get a job as a forensic accountant, you will need to get a degree in accounting, and later possibly go on to achieve a CPA certification.