Anyone who is being honest will tell you that financial statement audits don’t find fraud. On the rare occasion they do, but by and large audits are not designed to detect fraud and the auditors don’t have enough fraud detection training.
One solution to this problem is the engagement of forensic accountants to look for fraud. But companies don’t seem to interested in going the extra step.
Today Hewlett-Packard announced that an internal investigation revealed accounting fraud by Autonomy, a company that was acquired by HP last year for more than $10 billion. More specifically, the company said: Continue reading