In Chapter 11 of Forensic Analytics Second Edition I review time-series analysis. This statistical technique uses our past data (presumably free of errors or fraud) to make a forecast. These forecasts are then compared to the actual numbers and large differences between the two sets of values tells us that conditions have changed. This change could be due to errors or fraud. In my new video I use historical U.S. 2014-2019 sales data to generate forecasts for 2020 for supermarket, online, department store, and total retail sales. I then compare the January-June 2020 actual sales amounts to the forecasts. Supermarket and online sales were higher than forecast for March to June 2020. However, total retail and food services sales for March to June 2020 were 281,271 million less than expected. The time-series analysis was run in Minitab. A link to my Excel spreadsheet is given in the YouTube video’s Description.
About Mark Nigrini
Mark J. Nigrini, Ph.D. is an associate professor at the John Chambers College of Business and Economics at West Virginia University. Mark is the recipient of the 2020 Outstanding Accounting Educator award of the West Virginia Society of CPAs. In his spare time, he enjoys overseas travelling, playing darts, listening to music, watching British television series, and walking 10,000 steps per day.
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