When Numbers Don’t Add Up: Accounting Fraud and Financial Technology

The book begins with a brief assessment of corporate crime, fraud in general and how accounting fraud is different. There is a review of notorious cases such as Enron (2001) and recently Toshiba (2015) including the socio-economic consequences of this nefarious crime. The author contextualised the phenomenon of accounting fraud using a framework he developed called ‘Corporate Governance Cosmos’. Thereafter, the book contains an up to date literature review (in order to make the book more readable academic references have been kept to an absolute minimum but a full reference list is provided) beginning with a thorough appraisal and critique of the seminal theory in this area namely the Fraud Triangle and its different variations. There is a comprehensive exploration of the motivations for accounting fraud and a growing realisation that Dark Triad (Psychopathy, Narcissism & Machiavelli) tendencies may explain why executives engage in accounting fraud. There is a small contribution to the literature by the author who expands an established framework entitled Cooks Recipes Incentives Monitoring End results (C R I M E) by Rezaee (2005). The author extended it to C R I M E L where L is the ‘Learning’ from 33 international case studies of accounting fraud.
Accountants, auditors, anti-fraud practitioners and graduate students will find the mini case studies of accounting fraud particularly useful as it makes the phenomenon tangible and more understandable. The penultimate chapter is a study of the likely impact of financial technology on accounting fraud.
The author concludes by pulling salient previous sections and philosophical ideas together including a brief discussion of ethics, forwarding his IFAC Ethical Triangle, his vision for the future accountant which he refers to as Accounting Engineers and an ancient prescription for the curse of Accounting Fraud.

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