How to Detect Fraud Using Benford's Law

Forensic Accountant Robert A. Bonavito discusses Benford’s Law which is a technique to detect fraud especially when analyzing tax returns, general ledgers and other items that contain a large amount of numerical data

Topic Overview:
✔️ What is Benford’s Law?
✔️ Expected Data When Applying Benford's Law
✔️ Example of Benford's Law by Analyzing COVID Data

Website Mentioned:

Robert A. Bonavito, CPA
1812 Front St.
Scotch Plains, NJ 07076
908-322-7719

[currently]

One Month Ago... Bruh, he drops the smoking gun a month before it happens. This man is a psychic!

[austinbanks-wilson]

Robert my man, get ready for a Red wave of Subs. 🙏🏾

[jasonransdell]

Upvote if you are here because of the 2020 election “results”.

[pbx]

Wow I stumbled upon this. Great presentation by the way, I’m wondering, can you apply Benfords Law to the results Of the 2020 Presidential Election?

[nomorebs-vwop]

I don't think Biden/Harris and Dr Fauci knew about this law.

[gregorw]

No, you can’t use Benford’s Law to tell whether this cdc data is manipulated. For one the dataset is much too small (only 56 data points), giving random events too much weight.
You can do the same analysis for the population count of the US states and will get a similar “fraudulent” looking histogram.

[ilect]

To those wondering, Benfords law importantly requires values from multiple orders of magnitude inorder to be accurate (eg. 10-1000). If it happens to be that the large majority >90% happen to be in the same order of magnitude you begin to see a normal distribution

[suemeejim]

From a Statistician:
The sample size you're using for this data analysis is way too small. I did this myself using the coronavirus cases for every county in the United States and found that the data follows Benford's Law almost perfectly. Another condition of Benford's Law that is being violated is that you have to have a data set that spans a large number of values. In this case, you have a very high preponderance of cases that fall in the Tens of Thousands and Hundreds of Thousands. I can link the data sheet if anyone is interested.

[Memetologist]

Do a video on the election using Benfords Law. Thank you.

[aaron]

Branford’s law is known to not work well with data sets with 500 or fewer transactions.

[rev]

I'm amazed that youtube would recommend this. The machine AI must not realize this goes against their narrative.

[aaronphillips]

I bet you had no idea this video was going to blow up due to the elections.

[wemustdissent]

You should probably mention that Benford's law only applies to datasets that cross several orders of magnitude. A lot of people are being mislead by this with the election results. If, for example, all the values in the dataset are two digit numbers then Benford's law does NOT apply.

[jackchu]

The Youtube algorithm is trying to tell us something but I wonder what it could be hmmm... 🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔

[szendrich]

I've subscribed because I want to see a video of Benford's law applied to this election.

[Shutupasecond]

Who's here after the 2020 us election?? Haha

[rickswineberg]

I did a presentation of Benford's Law in my fraud class in the Masters of Accounting Degree.
I would do an overlay of the presented number against the Benford's distribution.

[MReda]

The numbers in a phone book won't follow Benford's law. Also there are some assumptions that must be true in your data for Benford's law to be applicable.

[TK_Trickster]

that awkward moment when bidens election results break this law, and only in the swing states lol

[maxtabmann]

Accountants using math and never heared about statistical standard deviations. Whenever someone say "Its very complicated, it really means, he did not understand the thing"