Benford's Law - 9789814583688

This book tells the story of a newly discovered and apparently mysterious digital phenomenon of Benford's Law. This phenomenon manifests itself by the empirical finding that not all digits are created equal, but rather that low digits such as 1, 2, 3 occur much more frequently than high digits such as 7, 8, 9, in accounting, financial, scientific, and almost all other data types. This work represents the first ever published work giving a comprehensive and in depth account of all the theoretical aspects and applications of Benford's Law. The reader is subsequently led into a fascinating intellectual journey through the interacting worlds of digits, numbers, and quantities, a journey that ends with the compelling conclusion that the entire phenomenon is truly quantitative in nature, and applicable just as well to the ancient Roman, Mayan, and Egyptian digit-less civilizations. The second section covers the applications of the law in forensic data analysis for the purpose of fraud detection. It is concise, reader-friendly, and can be understood without deep knowledge in statistical theory or difficult mathematics. This fraud detection section gathers all known methods, results, and standards in the accounting and auditing industry, from quite a wide variety of articles on this issue, summarizes and fuses them into a singular coherent whole. In addition, a newly invented (patent-pending) digital algorithm is presented, enabling the auditor to detect such fraud even when the sophisticated and well-educated cheater is aware of the law and attempts to appear as if he or she is innocently complying with the digital pattern. A large portion of the book is devoted to understanding the variety of causes explanations of the phenomenon. Seeing Benford's Law in this bird's eye view enables the reader to see the forest in all its glory and beauty instead of tiring one's self repeatedly checking individual trees.