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Sixth IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM'06)
Large Scale Detection of Irregularities in Accounting Data
Hong Kong
December 18-December 22
ISBN: 0-7695-2701-9
Stephen Bay, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, USA
Krishna Kumaraswamy, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, USA
Markus G. Anderle, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, USA
Rohit Kumar, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, USA
David M. Steier, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, USA
In recent years, there have been several large accounting frauds where a company's financial results have been intentionally misrepresented by billions of dollars. In response, regulatory bodies have mandated that auditors perform analytics on detailed financial data with the intent of discovering such misstatements. For a large auditing firm, this may mean analyzing millions of records from thousands of clients. This paper proposes techniques for automatic analysis of company general ledgers on such a large scale, identifying irregularities - which may indicate fraud or just honest errors - for additional review by auditors. These techniques have been implemented in a prototype system, called Sherlock, which combines aspects of both outlier detection and classification. In developing Sherlock, we faced three major challenges: developing an efficient process for obtaining data from many heterogeneous sources, training classifiers with only positive and unlabeled examples, and presenting information to auditors in an easily interpretable manner. In this paper, we describe how we addressed these challenges over the past two years and report on experiments evaluating Sherlock.
Citation:
Stephen Bay, Krishna Kumaraswamy, Markus G. Anderle, Rohit Kumar, David M. Steier, "Large Scale Detection of Irregularities in Accounting Data," icdm, pp.75-86, Sixth IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM'06), 2006
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