Product Description

Providing a comprehensive framework for building an effective fraud prevention model, Fraud Risk Assessment: Building a Fraud Audit Program presents a readable overview for developing fraud audit procedures and building controls that successfully minimize fraud. An invaluable reference for auditors, fraud examiners, investigators, CFOs, controllers, corporate attorneys, and accountants, this book helps business leaders respond to the risk of asset misappropriation fraud and uncover fraud in core business systems.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #562448 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

From the Inside Flap

Fraud Risk Assessment

Today's professional standards are requiring corporations, CPA firms, and internal auditors to provide Sarbanes-Oxley and Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) regulators with assurance and opin-ions regarding fraud risk management and to incorporate fraud detection into their audit plan. But many auditors today are, unfortunately, ill-equipped on how to prevent or handle fraud.

Providing a comprehensive framework for building an effective fraud prevention model, Fraud Risk Assessment: Building a Fraud Audit Program presents a readable overview for developing fraud audit procedures and building controls that successfully minimize fraud.

An invaluable reference for auditors, fraud examiners, investigators,?CFOs, controllers, corporate attorneys, and accountants, Fraud Risk Assessment: Building a Fraud Audit Program helps business leaders respond to the risk of asset misappropriation fraud and uncover fraud in core business systems. Renowned financial investigator Leonard Vona shows readers how to build a fraud model using a fraud risk assessment strategy that requires consideration of the fraud schemes, fraud concealment strategies, opportunity points, and fraud motivation unique to their organizations.

Including important information on methods of responding to the risk of fraud and data mining for fraud schemes, Fraud Risk Assessment: Building a Fraud Audit Program also provides audit procedures and thoroughly examines topics including:

• Fraud theory

• Fraud audit

• Fraud penetration risk assessment

• Fraud in expenditure

• Contract fraud

• Bribery

• Travel expense

• Payroll fraud

• Revenue fraud

• Fraud control theory

• Fraud investigation for the auditor

Locating fraud in today's business system is not an option but a requirement. Fraud Risk Assessment: Building a Fraud Audit Program helps professionals to focus on using assertive fraud risk assessment to build audit programs that respond to the risk of asset misappropria-tion fraud.

From the Back Cover

Praise for

Fraud Risk Assessment

Building a Fraud Audit Program

"This book is a must for every Chief Audit Executive and every internal audit library. The book details how CAEs can incorporate fraud risk assessments into their strategic plans as well as explaining to the staff levels how to audit for fraud in specific high exposure areas such as travel, contracts, and expenditures. It is easy to follow and provides an excellent blueprint."
—Joel Kramer, CPA, Managing Director, Internal Audit Division
MIS Training Institute

"Fraud Risk Assessment presents a straightforward discourse on fraud. Mr. Vona's seamless approach to fraud investigation provides in-house examiners and accounting and legal professionals with critical guidance to develop fraud detection plans and to assess and minimize risk. A thorough review of this book is vital for any professional involved in the prevention, detection or prosecution of fraud."
—Bonnie S. Baker, Attorney, Deily, Mooney & Glastetter, LLP

Billions of dollars a year are lost to business fraud. Is your business next?

Times are changing. At one time, it was not directly an auditor's responsibility to detect fraud, and even professional standards avoided the word "fraud." Today, it is accepted that the auditor has an obligation to respond to the risk of fraud. In Fraud Risk Assessment: Building a Fraud Audit Program, author and industry expert Leonard Vona reveals a fraud audit approach that helps you answer the following questions within your own organization:

• Who may be committing fraud within my organization?

• What type of fraud should I be looking for?

• Should fraud be viewed as an inherent risk?

• How might fraud opportunity impact internal controls?

• How might fraud be concealed within our business systems?

• How can we incorporate the fraud theory into our audit approach?

• How should we use fraud auditing to detect fraud?

Anticipate the red flags of fraud before they appear. Fraud Risk Assessment: Building a Fraud Audit Program provides sound advice that auditors and accountants will find invaluable.

About the Author

Leonard W. Vona, CPA, CFE, is afinancial investigator with more than thirtyyears of diversified auditing and forensic accounting experience, including a distin-guished eighteen-year private industry career. His firm advises clients in areas of litigation support, financial investigations, and fraud prevention.

Mr. Vona has successfully conducted more than 100 financial investigations for some of the largest high-profile corporations in the United States. His financial investigation experience includes embezzlement, economic damage, asset theft, bribery, intellectual property theft, and disbursement schemes.

Mr. Vona lectures nationally and internationally on fraud risk assessments, fraud investigation, fraud prevention and detection, and fraud schemes perpetrated on companies. He reg-ularly speaks at audit conferences and has developed the Fraud Training Curriculum for the MIS Training Institute, an internationally recognized audit training organization.

Customer Reviews

A disappointing purchase
My manager and I both felt this was a poorly written book. I have no doubt that the author is a competent fraud investigator, but his writing left much to be desired. There was no organizational flow to the book, no rhyme or reason to how he bulleted and arranged his points, to help me stay on track with him. It felt like he was just babbling information onto the pages. A lot of it is good information, but it was extremely difficult to go away with a clear understanding of how to structure my own fraud audit program. It didn't help that almost every page had a grammatical error in it, which was not only distracting but also contributed to it feeling thrown together and not well-thought out. I'm amazed that the editors published it in this state.

There is some useful content, particularly in the chapters that discuss examples of specific fraud schemes, and the data mining chapter. I will use those areas as a reference on audits. But the remaining chapters, which I had hoped would lay out good, step-by-step strategies for building a fraud program, left much to be desired. The content may all be there, but I think it should be the writer's responsibility, not mine, to organize it clearly and make something useful out of it.

A Good Attempt
I have to agree that Vona's writing can be improved. His thoughts are disjointed and one has serious difficulty in garnering a comprehensive picture of his perspective on Fraud Risk. He describes three ways of doing a Fraud Risk that should more appropriately be described as three stages of a developing fraud risk strategy. Fraud Risk, like Controlled Self Assessment, is the latest craze for consultants and some external auditors. They are generally full of catch phrases and jargon but appear to possess little real knowledge of the activity as a logical concept.
The CFE who praised this book made me wince, but then, he was vague on his basis for doing so.
Vona does not appear to see business risk analysis as a precursor to fraud risk, which I would argue is axiomatic. He should, however, be congratulated for making a valiant effort to address this controversial topic.

Anders VP Internal Audit
Well structured and well researched book. It has given great help when designing my audit plans.