Towards an understanding of Forensic Accounting
Purpose: Traditionally there are three approaches to defining forensic accounting, a narrow, a broad and a comprehensive approach. In order to test this, our paper aims to answer the following questions: “What is the presence of ‘forensic accounting’ in NZ, Australia and South America?” “What has happened in the field of ‘Forensic Accounting’ over the past decade?” And “How is the field changing?”
Design/ Methodology/ Approach: This paper adopts a framework developed by Guthrie, Ricceri and Dumay (2012) to perform a structured literature review to disseminate and discuss the various ways that the term ‘forensic accounting’ is presented while simultaneously testing the validity of three categories of definitions identified above.
Findings: In New Zealand, Australia and South America there is evidence of three different views of Forensic Accounting, but that the narrow definitions dominates.
Research limitation/ Implications: Given the multi-lingual nature of our research and our lack of fluency in two of the languages (Spanish and Portuguese), our findings were not as extensive as they could be. Another limitation was related to inherent problems of search engines, where several results were returned with few relevant publications.
Originality/ Value: The findings of our paper demonstrate the developing, multidisciplinary nature of forensic accounting; however this is not being utilised in publications as they focus on the role of forensic accounting and fraud. Additionally, our paper discusses several trends in the field of forensic accounting literature including increased reliance on websites.