Re:The vanished grandeur of accounting
by bornhuetter on Monday June 23, 2014 @06:06PM
(#7935031)
In practice, forensic accounting is roughly as interesting as archaeology. It makes for some great headlines in the end, but there is an enormous amount of detail and bureaucracy you have to dig through to get there.
> In practice, forensic accounting is roughly as interesting as archaeology. It makes for some great headlines in the end, but there is an enormous amount of detail and bureaucracy you have to dig through to get there.
Perhaps accountants and archeologists would say the same about coding.
Re:The vanished grandeur of accounting
by enraged_camel on Tuesday June 24, 2014 @07:08AM
(#7937051)
Coding is a creative endeavor. In contrast, forensic accounting is more similar to reading code someone else wrote and trying to figure out what the hell they were thinking when they wrote it.
That's basically what I'm doing today. I'm trying to figure out what the hell that guy that originally wrote this codebase was thinking. (Probably something like "Oh hey, Ruby has this feature Java didn't have, let's use it in exactly the wrong way!")
You haven't been coding long enough if you hadn't had projects that consisted mostly of just that.
I've done almost nothing and I look at my code and wonder that. Yes, I'm doing it wrong.
Every creative endeavor is 1% of inspiration, followed by 99% or perspiration. That's the only way to manifest the pretty pictures inside your head onto a tangible medium that can reach others.
Creativity without hard, and often dull, work is called "Day dreaming".
Re:The vanished grandeur of accounting
by hessenwolf on Tuesday June 24, 2014 @07:26AM
(#7937105)
Forensic accounting is to accounting what debugging Cobol is to coding, maybe?
You've just described my last three months.
Nice
Re:The vanished grandeur of accounting
by john_other_john on Monday June 23, 2014 @06:57PM
(#7935288)
There is also just weeding through to prove very blatant frauds, which can be forensic in nature, if payments are hidden in group company loans or sale and buy back deals, or discounting tax rebate incomes. I mean starting with a very obvious con, you still have to prove it. Currently a project if mine, in this way. Not huge, but close to twenty million dollar property fraud.
Re:The vanished grandeur of accounting
by andrewflnr on Monday June 23, 2014 @10:05PM
(#7935856)
I suspect that's pretty well captured in the comparison to "spelunking through git commits on a 10 MLOC project". (I say "suspect" because I haven't actually done either, thank God)
Re:The vanished grandeur of accounting
by rahimnathwani on Tuesday June 24, 2014 @05:23AM
(#7936817)
You can use computers to do some of the digging:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford's_law#Accounting_fraud_...
I'm friends with a former state senator who's a forensic accountant. She used to read bills from back to front, because they put all the shenanigans in the back. They'd be written really obscurely, and time was always short, but she'd still catch stuff. One small example was public money going to fund a party at some senator's home. She wouldn't give either side a pass, which probably helps explain why she lost the support of her party and got voted out.
Later she ran for state auditor, so I did some campaigning for her. But she lost in the primary to a woman whose qualification consisted of some time on her local school board, but who talked tough and described herself as a "pistol-packin Mama."
Re:The vanished grandeur of accounting
by mathattack on Tuesday June 24, 2014 @09:50AM
(#7937700)
This is a great article, because accounting is more than just the extremes of bean counting and fraud.
To analogize, imagine spelunking through git commits on a 10 MLOC project trying to figure out: "is someone trying to insert a backdoor? is someone just incompetent? is this just the predictable result of a death march?"