Forensic Accounting in Practice
Brittany Baskin
Dr. John Theodore Contemporary Business November 18, 2012

When you think of the term forensics, what comes to mind? For younger readers CSI probably rings a bell, while the elder crowd would probably think of Quincy. Both TV shows glorified the acts of forensics in a medical sense. But a lesser-known form of forensics has been growing in use around the world. In light of recent accounting scandals throughout the world, investors and regulators have searched for various different methods to improve the safety of investors through more diligent accounting reporting practices. Until recently, detecting fraud was thought to be a part of the responsibility of the accountant. Fraud was something the internal or external auditors were expected to guard against by their periodic audits. We now know that auditors can only check for compliance of a company’s books to the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAPs) and to company policy; therefore, a new category of accounting had to be established, one which revealed the fraud for companies with suspected fraudulent transactions. This new area of accounting is known as forensic accounting. To fully understand the definition of forensic accounting, we can use parts of the definition of forensic medicine and accounting, both taken from Webster’s Dictionary, to produce a clear definition. Forensic medicine is a “science that deals with the relation and application of facts to legal problems.” Accounting is “the system of recording and summarizing business and financial transactions and analyzing, verifying, and reporting the result.” So, the combination of these two definitions would yield forensic accounting as an accounting method that deals with the relation and application of system used to record and summarizes business and financial