Back to Basics – Putting Benford’s Law to work

Description

Abstract: It may seem intuitive that, in a list of numbers, the first digit will just as likely be one numeral as any other. But “Benford’s Law” shows that “1” appears nearly a third of the time, and each succeeding numeral has a progressively smaller frequency. This makes Benford’s law an useful tool for investigators to unearth fraud. This article explains how, and discusses a spreadsheet tool that makes it easy to put this technique into effect.