Design and Implementation of a Tool to Detect Accounting Frauds

Accounting frauds of a company have direct and indirect effects on financial institutions. For instance, the well-known cases of Enron and WorldCom became a major scandal with worldwide repercussions in 2002. As a result, we began to pay attention to accounting transparency. Since then, many countries have established a law, a principle or a guide of accounting and accounting audit like Sarbanes-Oxley Act and Statements of Auditing Standards. However, some companies commit accounting frauds to manipulate, change or delete financial statements, despite these rules. The reason why companies do this is because they want to increase their stock prices. Thus, companies commit skillful frauds following accounting principles, which makes it difficult to detect a fraud unless one is a forensic accountant. In this paper we propose a method to detect accounts with fraud symptoms in financial statements which hide accounting frauds or attempts of tax evasions. Furthermore, we have implemented a tool to detect them and tested it using data of companies which committed accounting frauds.