Forensic Accounting

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If artificial intelligence is eroding the base for the analytics-based transactional advisory work ( see our feature story ), what's left? Where are the long-term, relationship-driven client-centric advisory services that call for holistic judgment take account of human psychology and emotion?

Fortunately for accountants, there are a lot to choose from, including the four we're examining: forensic accounting, valuation services, M⁘A advisory and estate planning. These are just some of the areas that are seen as relatively safe from disruption by AI and automation — at least for now.

"The ability to explain the nature of a fraud scheme and how it was detected and who was running it and why they did it is something that probably will not be comprehended by AI anytime soon. We're tasked with answering questions and, at the end of the day, parties also like to know [the why behind the answer]," he said.

This is not to say that forensic accounting professionals do not use AI. Machine learning-driven models play a vital role in sorting through all the data and picking out possible red flags. Zweighaft said that forensic accountants have long used AI models, sometimes bespoke to the client, to contextualize a dataset so as to more easily spot anomalies and understand the financial damages they could represent. Still, he said it can be a "chicken and the egg" scenario, because those models still need to be validated one way or another.

Still, once such models are prepared and validated, they can produce insights that even human professionals might miss. Zweighaft talked about an older case where someone was booking flights first on Delta and then would "dummy up" a second airline voucher for American Airlines. This was before AI analysis was in heavy use, so it was human investigators who eventually realized this person was putting the same ticket number on both documents, which eventually exposed him. Zweighaft said that feeding the flight data into an AI might produce the same sort of finding but faster.