Statistical methods based on Benford’s distribution, Z- and I‡2-statistics are being successfully applied to detect likely accounting and reporting fraud, for example in the daily usage of the Internal Revenue Service in the USA, and in historical analysis of Greek macroeconomic...

Benford's Law is used to test for data irregularities. While novel, there are two weaknesses in the current methodology. First, test values used in practice are too conservative and the test values of this paper are more powerful and hold for fairly small samples. Second, testing requires...

Benford's Law is used to test for data irregularities. While novel, there are two weaknesses in the current methodology. First, test values used in practice are too conservative and the test values of this paper are more powerful and hold for fairly small samples. Second, testing requires...

The objective of this paper is to provide the statistician with a method for the challenging task of deciding whether a given data set might have been invented in a fraudulent way or appearing authentic. This is done not by examining the numbers themselves, but surprisingly, rather by...