A lot of people won’t know what a forensic accountant is. I didn’t. It was only when I started working with a team of them at a prestigious accountancy firm that I really got to appreciate the importance of the role and the people that do it.

A forensic account is someone who applies accountancy skills to investigate financial discrepancies and inaccuracies. These investigations will be used to find fraudulent activity, financial misrepresentation or even misconduct.

There is one word I would use when describing forensic accountants and that is versatile

Who ya gonna call?

The truth is a forensic accountant could be useful to a lot of us.

If you run a business, for example, you may believe that there is some internal fraud going on – who ya gonna call? A forensic accountant. You may be about to buy a business and want to know more about its books – who ya gonna call? A forensic accountant.

On a personal level you and your siblings may have been left money or maybe you are going through a divorce and believe money is being hidden from you. That’s right, a forensic accountant can help with these things.

Business evaluations, tax audits, insurance term reviews, stolen paper records; there are a lot of situations where a forensic accountant can help.

Skills

There is one word I would use when describing forensic accountants and that is versatile. I’ve seen them successfully deal with sporadic and often unhelpful data to help a client. This is due to the diverse range of investigations they may conduct.

Applying technology to help clients make sense of sporadic and often unhelpful data is what S-branch does best.

Alongside obvious structured data sources such as companies house records, a forensic accountant may receive data in all manner of ways: boxes full of documents, ceased laptops or mobile phones, ancient financial records, interview videos and recordings to name but a few.

How S-branch can help

Applying technology to help clients make sense of sporadic and often unhelpful data is what S-branch does best. S-branch is truly independent and remains software agnostic, ensuring our clients get the best solution for their needs; whether they need forensic accounting software or just somewhere to store their intelligence.

Here are some of the ways S-branch can help forensic accountants.

Visualisation Software

Finding hidden connections between different data sources, whether that be financial transactions or social media, requires a good eye. This becomes especially important when you are trying to ‘follow the money’.

The use of visualisation analysis tools or graph visualisations to understand complex data is now common among analysts. Otherwise unseen connections between data can be identified and drilled down upon with ease. Visualisation tools also offer a clear way to present findings and share results.

Unstructured Data Analysis

Large amounts of text can pose a challenge to analyse and understand. We keep generating more of it every day. This ‘unstructured text’ can be in documents, emails or social media posts. Indexing this text can help when searching for keywords, but what if you don’t know the keywords? What if you don’t know where to start?

Unstructured data analysis software allows machines to ‘read’ unstructured text. This could give an understanding of what entities (for example people, organisations or locations) are present in the text. Some of these tools also extract relationships from the sentences and are even multi-lingual making the initial analysis of large amounts of documents quick and easy.

Visual/Audio Analysis

Manually documenting the content of video and audio files is a time-consuming process. Depending on what you are investigating it may also be an impossible task.

The use of cognitive technology to transcribe or even reference known items held within audio and video content can unlock the intelligence held within this kind of media.

Intelligence Data Stores

Having a secure and audited place to hold intelligence as part of a case is of real importance to a forensic accountant. A place where all details of an investigation can be quickly and accurately searched.

A lot of good data stores use the POLE model (People, Objects, Locations, and Events). By framing data in this way, relationships can easily be captured and explored. Intelligence stores will also hold relevant charts, visualisations or even referenced documents, ensuring everything of relevance is in one place.

Companies House Integration

Companies house is a great free resource where you can get access to company information, current and resigned officers or insolvency information.

Making regular queries of companies house through their website is easy, but taking that information and collaborating it with other data sources can be a manual task which is time-consuming. By integrating this resource alongside your intelligence data store it is easier and quicker to see the full picture.

Are you a forensic accountant? Are the technologies above of interest? Or are you struggling with some other form of data you’ve received? Either way, S-branch would love to help.

 

Cognitive Technology

In its simplest form, cognitive technology is software mimicking the human brain. A human brain can read text, listen to sound and spot objects in videos. A human brain understands context, it can learn from previous experience and it can adapt as new information comes its way. In short: the human brain is brilliant. Why would we use anything else?

Well, we are in an age of data generation. On average users of the Internet generate 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day. It’s not just reserved for the Internet either, companies are generating more internal data than ever and as storage becomes cheaper the data only grows.

The key to a company’s success may be hidden in their own data. The meaning of life may well be held on the Internet; you never know.

With this newly acquired data comes great opportunity. The key to a company’s success may be hidden in their own data. The meaning of life may well be held on the Internet; you never know. The problem of course is the sheer volume. The task of understanding the data and obtaining anything useful from it is impossible to do manually; although I’ve seen people try!

This is where cognitive technology comes in. Forms of artificial Intelligence, computer vision, machine learning, natural language processing and speech recognition; that can be used to understand the data for us. It is only then that we can then gain intelligence from the huge amount of data. All that is needed is an analytics system with cognitive technology…

All that is needed is an analytics system with cognitive technology…

Build your own

One option is to build a system from scratch.  By cherry picking the best technology companies (as well as open source resources) that provide cognitive analytics. You could feed data to and from these technologies into the system. You could pick a high-performance graph database to deal with the data and build a cutting edge browser-based UI to give statistical and visual analytics to the users.

This option is a viable but costly one. It will require a good solutions architect who understands the problem, some high-end developers, a data scientist and a project manager. It’s also a time-consuming proposition. You aren’t going to be getting results tomorrow.

Off-the-shelf

Why build something when somebody else has already developed it? Another option is to buy an ‘off the shelf’ solution. Here the deployment will be fast, you will get support when you get stuck and the UI and back end database have already been thought through.

This option is appealing and may be cheaper. It is common though that you are then tied in to any technology that the software vendor has partnered with. This may mean: if you want improved voice recognition or natural language processing in Arabic, you may not find the solution you want.

Visallo – Plug ang Play Cognitive Technology

Visallo is one of the ‘off the shelf’ solutions described above. It is based on a high-performance graph database and it allows users to perform: statistical, visual (graph), temporal and geo-spatial analysis all from one intuitive browser-based UI.

While that is all appealing, the interesting part to Visallo is their attitude to extension and customization. They actively encourage it. Jeff Kunkle, the President of Visallo actually wrote a blog entitled ‘We love when customers replace our software’

Visallo was designed with extension and customization in mind. From the underlying data store to data processing algorithms and UI plugins, you’re not stuck with a one-size-fits-all solution.

This means if the default OpenNLP plug-in that analyses text and extracts entities (People, Organisations, Locations and Vehicles) from unstructured data doesn’t fit your needs; choose another one. If you want to integrate with you existing investment in voice recognition technology; no problem.

This attitude to ‘plug and play’ technology allows the fast deployment and support of an off-the-shelf product, with the flexibility of a build-your-own solution.

For more information on Visallo visit their website or contact S-branch to find out more. If you’d like to find out more about cognitive technologies and the application into crime and fraud; feel free to call.

S-branch offers independent advice, so even if Visallo is not for you, we can help you find the solution that is.