Forensic Elite: Detective of Numbers
Tara Albright
Strayer University
BUS 504 Contemporary Business
February 24, 2013
Dr. Jason M. Barrett

Forensic Elite: Detective of Numbers
No one in the world likes a snitch. In the early 2000’s the urban campaign “Stop Snitching or Die” changed the face of whistle blowing in the United States (Masten, 2009). Neighborhood violence during the “Stop Snitching or Die” campaign increased as law abiding citizen cowered inside their homes as gun shots rang out feet away from their doorsteps (Masten, 2009). In corporate America companies faced huge financial lost as the “Stop Snitching or Die” theology spilled into boardrooms and accounting departments. The corporate world was not as brazen as the urban world killing anyone that help out law enforcement, but the results of company leaders keeping quiet about misconduct slowly murdered the American economic system. While corporate leaders played their hand at boardroom gangbanging by lying, stealing, and falsifying financial documents, the world would see snitching taken to a new level (Masten, 2009). The job of combing through those illegal financial documents would go to an elite set of men and women, called forensic accountant. Forensic accountants help America recover huge amounts of financial dollars by bring corporate leaders to justice who made illegal business decisions (Davis, Farrell, & Ogilby, 2009).
Attributes of the Elite
Forensic accounting/accountant (FA) involves the application of accounting concepts and techniques to legal problems (Davis, Farrell, & Ogilby, 2009). “Initially, forensic accountants were used by government agencies, such as the CIA, the FBI and the IRS, to uncover and investigate fraud” (Ramaswamy, 2005, p. 2).With the recent economic downturn the profession of forensic accounting has seen a 200% increase since the Enron and