I grew up in Cape Town, South Africa just a short drive from beautiful beaches and captivating scenery. I graduated from Milnerton High School and I remember that my favorite class in high school was Mr. Smuts’ accounting class.

I was allocated to the South African Police as my military service and remember enjoying the classes on criminal law. I studied undergraduate accounting at the University of Cape Town and there my favorite classes were the commercial law classes taught by a law professor and managerial accounting taught by two professors that would later offer me a position in the department. Besides the law classes there was only a small exposure to occupational fraud in our second auditing class (remember Equity Funding?). I did my articles of clerkship at H. Tarley and Company, and Peat, Marwick, Mitchell and Company, and I’ve often wondered if we missed any embezzlement schemes or tax evasion cases (company owners getting the company to pay personal expenses) because we weren’t ever looking for occupational fraud.

My Ph.D. dissertation The Detection of Income Tax Evasion Through an Analysis of Digital Distributions combined Benford’s Law and tax evasion. The analysis was done using SAS at a time when analyzing 100,000 records needed a mainframe computer. After publishing an article on payroll fraud, I was invited to give a workshop on Benford’s Law and to do some hands-on work on taxpayer data at the offices of the Dutch Ministry of Finance. I regularly wrote to the reporters at the Wall Street Journal and I finally made an impression on Lee Berton. A while later after a meeting in New York City the Wall Street Journal published an article about my work. That was the start of my forensic accounting data analytics hands-on work, and my string of related journal publications.

I enjoy presenting my “Benford’s Law” talk or my “Fraud Numbers” talk to students and audit professionals. I am also available for a workshop (one or two days). A workshop could include hands-on work using your data analysis software of choice. I could also tailor a workshop or a presentation for your specific preferences.