Uncategorized

Accounting has a reputation as a dry subject, full of technical terms. But most of those terms were not invented by experts in offices. They grew out of markets, money bags, benches, wooden sticks and checkered tablecloths. Merchants, clerks and royal officials used the words of their own time, and those words stayed with the … Read more

Benford’s Law says that in many real-world sets of numbers, the first digit is much more likely to be small. About 30% of numbers start with 1, while fewer than 5% start with 9. Auditors and fraud investigators compare financial records with this pattern. When invented numbers are mixed into real data, the pattern often … Read more