Forensic accounting is an area of accountancy that specialises in assisting parties to anticipated or actual disputes or litigation.
“Forensic” means “for use in court proceedings” and it is to that standard and potential outcome that forensic accountants work to.
It has also been defined as the use of accounting skills to investigate fraud or theft and to analyze financial information for use in legal proceedings.
At Rushmore, our forensic accountancy engagements can include:
Divorce and Family Law
As Forensic Accountants, we play a role in many divorce and family law disputes.
For example, we assist in the identification of all marital assets and liabilities, superannuation, and the preparation of a balance sheet for property settlement purposes.
We also value the businesses subject to a family law dispute and ensure that these are included at an appropriate valuation.
We can also assist parties by searching for hidden assets, both in Australia and overseas. Rushmore is also frequently called in by either the husband or wife to assist in any other analysis that is required, for example, assessing the financial contributions of the partners.
Business valuation
In many disputes, a business will need to be valued as part of the legal proceedings. We specialise in valuing all types of businesses for a court or other purpose. The majority of our business valuations are for family law or compulsory acquisition purposes. We can provide a fixed fee quote for many of our business valuations. Read more.
Personal Injury and Loss of Dependency
Rushmore assists compensation lawyers with:
- motor claims
- workplace incident claims
- public incident claims
- negligence claims; and
- criminal compensation claims.
Claims for compensation are critical for people involved motor accidents, workplace and other incidents. Our experts at Rushmore are Chartered and Forensic Accountants and we are members of the ICAA Special Interest Group in Forensic Accounting. We commonly assist legal counsel with loss of income calculations and other analysis for personal injury matters Read more.
Financial Investigations and Fraud
A financial investigation will be required when a company, organisation or individual believes that funds have been misappropriated.
The investigation may assist with the termination of an employee, commencing civil proceedings or may assist with initiating a report to the Police. Our staff have experience at working on both criminal and civil proceedings, and can provide clarity to our clients through the analysis and report that we provide.
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Data Analytics
We have considerable expertise in extracting, reformatting, analysing and reporting on complex sets of data. For each forensic accounting engagement that we conduct, we manage the data we receive through the use of databases and other analytical techniques.
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Accounting Irregularities
Rushmore Forensic specialises in solving complex accounting and system problems within a company or organisation. Using our mix of accounting and systems experience, we can quickly determine the cause of the problem and recommend steps to rectify the situation.
In our experience, accounting irregularities are caused by:
- Lack of reconciliation between system inputs and outputs
- A change in staff performing a particular task, which causes a slightly different process to be undertaken
- Reliance on internal system reports that have not been properly quality assured and are therefore reporting incorrect information
- A data entry or other error during a system migration
- Systems with poor quality, incorrect or missing master data
- Lack of regular bank reconciliation or reconciliation of other significant balances
- Failure to follow up and correct errors in reconciliations performed
- Fraud perpetrated by a member of staff or a vendor to the organisation
- A combination of a number of the above factors.
Further Information
We provide services to corporations, law firms and individuals in Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth and across Australia. If you would like further information about using our forensic accounting services for a divorce, litigation, or other forensic accounting matter, then please contact us for an obligation free discussion on (02) 8019 7262.