Question

1. Define and explain attorney-client privilege.

2.Discuss accountant-client privilege and explain in which circumstances this privilege is honored.

3. Explain Benford’s law and in what types of situations this technique is used.

4. Evaluate how computer evidence must be handled to be admissible in court. Be specific.

5. Analyze the validity of this statement: “Each state has a licensing board for forensic document examiners.”

6. Explain how forensic accountants can use the so-called COFEE device. Be specific.

Answer 1

1)attorney-client privilege

attorney-client privilege is the right to client to keep communication between the client and the attorney confidential. It is identified as the oldest privillage of confidential communication.

This term is stated by supreme court to ensure that client communicate with attorney in Full and Frankly, with regarding all disclosures.

2)accountant-client privilege

Like court protects confidential information right of Clients an Accountant is also supposed to have a confidentiality agreement with client so as to ensure protect the privacy of financial, and other confidential information, exchanged between an accountant and his or her client.

Consider if an accountant has two clients from same industry and are competition exist between them. It is viatel for account not to share any of clients details with another. There should be no self interest for an account with client's information. Not to disclose without court order.

3)Benford’s law

Benford's Law is a tool used by auditor to apply in various procedures in an Income Tax Audit, Is also called as Law of anomalous numbers.

In analysing a set of data of the leading digits is distributed in a specific nonuniform way. For example in a set of numbers which obeys Benford's Law 1 appears to be the significant digit about 30% of the time at the same instance 9 appears to be significant digit less than 5% of the time. Using Law also can assume Second and third Digits as well.

Application Could be used in Detection of accounting fraud by using simple comparison of first-digit frequency distribution and it helps to arrie at  plausible assumption that people who make up figures tend to distribute digits uniformly while conducting fraud.

Can be used as a statistical indicator of election fraud by using Benford's law to analyse election result.

There are many application instances of law such as in Credit card transactions ,Purchase orders ,Loan data ,Customer balances.

4)computer evidence and court

For a Computer evidence to be admissible in court, Before collecting data one should ensure its legality in such a way that to identify, collect and preserve digital evidence. The evidence collected should be authentic to be admissible in court otherwise will not be reliable.

The collection and analysis of data should be Trusted to ensure that the Evidence data is not prone for tampering or overwritting. Prsenting of eidence should be in its original state and which relates to the incident in a relevant way.

When it is presented before court the forensic examination should meets standards so as to ensure its correctness.

5)validity of this statement

Licensing board for forensic document examiners is established for the interest of the public and utilisation of science which is a program of certification in forensic document examination.

It doesnot required to have licensing board through each of the states but their aim is to  certify those voluntary applicants as qualified specialists who comply with the requirements of the Board.

Board is a non profit Organisation sponsored by American Society of Questioned Document Examiners and many such members organisation of Forensic Examiners.

6)forensic accountants

(The term is not clearly understandable. Ill explain to the extend of Forensic Accounting, Will address this requirement)

Forensic accounting is specific field cinsidered as the broader area of accounting. In this include crimes against property, financial fraud and corruption also gives expert testimony to Court in trails.

In the history there is alot of examples of forensic accountants uncover major financial fraud and accounting irregularities acted by executives in companies and by accounting firms.

Also in situaations where the stock market manipulations occurs and even manipulation of accounting figures by managements to window dress there forensic accountants is an essential element.