Faculty members co-author article

Ania and Jake Rose, assistant professors of accounting at Montana State University Bozeman College of Business co-authored an article in the August 2003 issue of the Journal of Accountancy that has attained national attention.

"Turn Excel into a Financial Sleuth, describes how to use Benford's Law to detect fraud in large sets of financial data. The pair created a custom VBA program that automatically detects fraud. The program and user manual are being distributed at no charge to all readers via the Internet.

With a readership of 370,000 subscribers, the Journal of Accountancy is known as the number one practitioner journal in accounting. Even though the article has only been in press for a brief period, the information has received a tremendous response.

Our program will be used by CPA firms around the world, litigation services firms, fraud detection specialists, internal auditors, the department of defense, accounting and auditing instructors, to name a few, Jake Rose said.

The Rose s have already received e-mails from more than 20 firms that plan to use the software and ideas. An accounting member of the United States Department of Defense was one to respond and states. "I work for the Defense Department and I loved your Journal article and the Fraud Buster worksheet. This is the best tool I have found to run a good Benford's analysis on a dataset."

A CPA firm specializing in valuation services wrote to Jake Rose, "I just read your article entitled "Turn Excel into a Financial Sleuth", which I enjoyed very much. I've read other articles about Benford's Law but they didn't seem to put the analysis into quite the perspective you and Ania have done in this article. I also appreciate the ease of using Excel versus using a data extraction software such as IDEA or ACL. We have some audit/review clients that I would love to try this out on their cash disbursements for the year."

Another CPA firm in Kentucky responded by saying, Creating the program was a great idea. We plan to use it regularly. Thank you for contributing it!