Abstract
What does a forensic analysis in corporation encompass? What do people involved need to know beforehand? What types of strategies and instruments are used by a forensic accountant? It is a game of cat and mouse, one that Dr. Heissner describes with examples from his daily business of uncovering fraud and corruption. Starting with methods of deception and concealment, Heissner takes the reader through the criminalistics and technological tools used to uncover and solve fraud, bribery and similar crimes. This range includes forensic data analysis, as well as interrogation methodology.
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- 1.
The American behavioral scientist Theodore Hill asked many hundreds of people to write down six figure numbers in a column off the top of their heads and was always able to identify a different frequency distribution in comparison to the “natural” distribution of numbers. Hill adapted the Benford Law further to fit manipulations in the “Hill Distribution” (see here Hofmann 2008, p. 552, and Odenthal 2009, p. 124).
- 2.
The lack of an initial suspicion means that you are still at the detection stage, an area of compliance management that will be addressed in detail in Chap. 4.
- 3.
See Article 80 StGB “Preparing for a war of aggression.”
- 4.
See Article 255 StGB “Extortion.”
- 5.
See Article 138 StGB “Failure to report offenses.”
- 6.
It is already clear at this stage that experience in the police and military service is crucial for developing the skills to carry out forensic investigations in commercial enterprises – naturally in cooperation with auditors in the traditional sense.
- 7.
Auditing firms such as EY also possess rooms that are secured with alarms and approved by the police for the storage of evidence.
- 8.
An exabyte corresponds to a billion gigabytes.
- 9.
There have also already been reports about this software in Germany: See Kaiser (2013).
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Heissner, S. (2015). Forensics. In: Managing Business Integrity. Management for Professionals. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12721-7_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12721-7_3
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