Accounting Fraud: How It's Done — Part 1

The "Trigger Issue"

This article is the first of a series on accounting fraud and follows on from a previous article, "The current economic climate - a golden age for fraud?",¹ where we explained why challenging economic environments can create pressures to commit accounting fraud, with employees forced to come up with creative accounting techniques — such as padding the financial results in response to what they may consider a temporary downturn — in the hope that better times will return.

We will provide a short "how-to guide" for committing accounting fraud, covering some of the mechanics behind the creative accounting techniques employed by fraudsters to distort financial performance.