Ứng dụng Benford’s Law phát hiện dấu hiệu gian lận báo cáo tài chính của công ty niêm yết Việt Nam
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24311/jabes/2021.32.11.01Keywords:
Benford’s Law, Financial statement FraudAbstract
This study applies Benford's Law to detect the signal of financial statement fraud of Vietnamese listed companies. The data includes 600 observations from two items of revenue and profit after tax disclosed in the financial statements of 100 companies listed on the Vietnamese stock exchange from 2015 to 2020. The study has examined the distribution of the actual data in the first digit, the second digit, and the first-two digits. Three statistical tests including Z-statistics, Chi-square, and Mean Absolute Deviation (MAD) are used to assess the conformity of a data set to Benford’s Law. The result proves that the data do not comply with Benford's Law in the first digit and the first-two digits leading to the financial statement signal fraud. This study recommends that auditors, fraud investigators could use Benford's Law as a tool in detecting financial statement fraud.
References
Alali, F. A., & Romero, S. (2013). Benford's Law: Analyzing a decade of financial data. Journal of Emerging Technologies in Accounting, 10(1), 1–39.
Amiram, D., Bozanic, Z., & Rouen, E. (2015). Financial statement errors: Evidence from the distributional properties of financial statement numbers. Review of Accounting Studies, 20(4), 1540–1593.
Benford, F. (1938). The law of anomalous numbers. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 78(4), 551–572.
Bouchetara, M., & Nassour, A. (2020). Internal auditing in the face of banking fraud, application of the Benford Law on Algerian private bank. UTMS Journal of Economics, 11(2), 108–120.
Carslaw, C. A. P. N. (1988). Anomalies in income numbers: Evidence of goal oriented behavior. The Accounting Review, 63(2), 321–327.
Dorris, B., Examiners, F., & Dorris, B. (2020). Report to the nations: Global study on occupational fraud and abuse. Association of Certified Fraud Examiners. Retrieved from https://www.acfe.com/report-to-the-nations/2020/
Durtschi, C., Hillison, W., & Pacini, C. (2004). The effective use of Benford’s Law to assist in the detecting of fraud in accounting data. Journal of Forensic Accounting, 5, 17–34.
Gorenc, M. (2019). Benford's Law as a useful tool to determine fraud in financial statements. Management, 14(1), 19–31.
Grammatikos, T., & Papanikolaou, N. I. (2021). Applying Benford’s Law to detect accounting data manipulation in the banking industry. Journal of Financial Services Research, 59, 115–142.
Hill, T. P. (1995). A statistical derivation of the significant-digit law. Statistical Science, 10(4),
354–363.
Hitchcock, M. (2018). The importance and implications of forensic accounting in the financial world.Undergraduate Honors College Teses 2016. Long Island University.
Jianu, I., & Jianu, I. (2021). Reliability of financial information from the perspective of Benford’s Law. Entropy, 23(5), 557.
Tri, H. T., Tran, P. T. K., & Huu, T. N. (2018). Benford’s Law – A tool to detect fraud in accounting data: A study in Vietnam. Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Finance and Economics ICFE 2018, 137–153.
Kumar, K., & Bhattacharya, S. (2007). Detecting the dubious digits: Benford's Law in forensic accounting. Significance, 4(2), 81–83.
Kuruppu, N. (2019). The application of Benford’s Law in fraud detection: A systematic methodology. International Business Research, 12(10), 1–10.
Li, F., Han, S., Zhang, H., Ding, J., Zhang, J., & Wu, J. (2019). Application of Benford’s Law in data analysis. Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 1168(3), 32133.
Loan, N. T., Hac, L. D., & Anh, N. V. H. (2018). Application of statistical methods for tax inspection of enterprises: A case study in Vietnam. In Anh L., Dong L., Kreinovich V., Thach N. (eds), Econometrics for Financial Applications.International Econometric Conference of Vietnam2018.Studies in Computational Intelligence, 760, 648–655. Cham: Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-73150-6_51
Nigrini, M. J. (1996). A taxpayer compliance application of Benford's Law. The Journal of The American Taxation Association, 18(1), 72–91.
Nigrini, M. J. (2012). Benford's Law: Applications for forensic accounting, auditing, and fraud detection (Vol. 586). NJ, United States: John Wiley & Sons.
Özarı, Ç., & Ocak, M. (2013). Detection of earnings management by applying Benford's Law in selected accounts: Evidence from quarterly financial statements of Turkish public companies. European Journal of Economics, Finance and Administrative Sciences, 59(4), 37–52.
Rad, M., Amiri, A., Ranjbar, M. H., & Salari, H. (2021). Predictability of financial statements fraud-risk using Benford’s Law. Cogent Economics & Finance, 9(1), 1889756.
Thomas, J. K. (1989). Unusual patterns in reported earnings. The Accounting Review, 64(4),
773–787.
Trần Thứ Ba, & Nguyễn Việt Hưng (2016). Nghiên cứu phương pháp kiểm tra sai sót của dữ liệu kế toán hỗ trợ kiểm toán báo cáo tài chính. Tạp chí Khoa học ĐHQGHN: Kinh tế và Kinh doanh, 32(3), 60–69.
Trần Thứ Ba, Lê Thủy Ngọc Sang, & Nguyễn Quốc Nhất. (2016). Nghiên cứu mô hình phân tích kiểm tra sai sót thuế giá trị gia tăng của doanh nghiệp. Tạp chí Khoa học và Công nghệ, 24, 115–127. Truy cập tại http://opac.iuh.edu.vn/TraCuuTaiLieuSo2XemChiTiet.aspx?Id=95194
Varian, H. R. (1972). Benford’s Law. American Statistician, 23, 65–66.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2021 JOURNAL OF ASIAN BUSINESS AND ECONOMIC STUDIES

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.



