Awareness towards Forensic Accounting and What Non-Accounting Experts Need to Know

Multidisciplinary areas of accounting are increasing day by day. One such multidisciplinary area is forensic accounting. Due to the increase of corporate frauds like in the cases of Enron and WorldCom, organizations are putting a special effort into the investigation of frauds. To investigate fraud, corporations need to be prepared. One way of this preparation is understanding the ideas of forensic accounting and the scopes and areas of forensic accounting. Not only for corporations but also for non-accounting experts knowledge of forensic accounting is important. This theoretical review deals with these issues and explains the technical terms of forensic accounting that non-accounting experts need to know to understand the basics of forensic accounting. This theoretical review also argues that auditing and forensic accounting are not the same. To be a forensic accountant understanding the term “Due Diligence” is a prerequisite. On the other hand, auditing is merely matching the financial statement with applicable standards. After making a comparison between auditing and forensic accounting, it is discussed that non-accounting experts need to make themselves familiar with financial accounting, financial ratios and also with the specialized analytical tools to understand the nature of the work of forensic accountants, their networking techniques, relation establishing techniques and inferential analysis techniques. This study also provides an extract of awareness towards forensic accounting that Bangladeshi accounting and auditing firms, multinational and local companies have.