Forensic accounting expert to speak at UB

Published September 26, 2013 This content is archived.

Author and forensic accounting expert Mark Nigrini will deliver the School of Management’s annual Sufrin lecture at 9 a.m. Oct. 3 in the Center for Tomorrow, North Campus.

Nigrini’s visit is sponsored by the Helen and Oscar Sufrin Lectureship in Accounting, which brings distinguished business professionals to the School of Management to speak about accounting issues.

A professor at the West Virginia University College of Business and Economics, Nigrini teaches auditing and forensic accounting. His current research includes the application of forensic analytics to such contemporary topics as detection of Ponzi schemes, the legal framework of fraud convictions and advanced theoretical work on Benford’s Law, the mathematical theory of leading digits.

Benford’s Law was developed by Frank Benford, a physicist in the 1930s, who discovered that there were predictable patterns to the digits in lists of numbers. His research showed that digits were not expected to be equally used in tabulated data, but that smaller digits are expected to occur more often.

Nigrini is the author of “Forensic Analytics,” which describes tests to detect fraud, errors, estimates and biases in financial data. He is also the author of “Benford’s Law,” the seminal work on applications of that topic.

His work has been featured in national and international media, including Financial Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, BBC Radio and NPR, and he has published papers on Benford’s Law in accounting academic journals, scientific journals and pure mathematics journals, as well as professional publications such as Internal Auditor and Journal of Accountancy.

Although the lecture is free and open to the public, reservations are required by Sept. 30 and can be made at mgt.buffalo.edu/sufrin. For more information, call Janet Kiefer at 645-3290.

Funding for the Sufrin lectureship is provided through the generous support of Leslie Sufrin and Gerald Sufrin, a long-time UB faculty member, in honor of their late parents.