According to the ACFE website the fraud triangle is a model for explaining the factors that cause someone to commit occupational fraud. It consists of three components which, together, lead to fraudulent behavior. Those three components are perceived un-shareable financial need, perceived opportunity and rationalization. Sampling is one way to check for fraud however it can be in effective. For samplings to be totally effective organizations will need to analyze all relevant transactions in order to effectively test and monitor internal controls. The Detecting and Preventing Fraud with Data Analytics e-book states that the primary reason to use data analytics to tackle fraud is because a lot of internal control systems have serious control weaknesses. One of the key aspects of data analytics is the ability for the technology to maintain comprehensive logs of all activities performed. Since, sampling is in-effective there needs to be a fraud detection that is repetitive, picking samples with continuous analysis. Ad-hoc investigate transactions and see if theres anything to indicate fraud or opportunities for fraud to be perpetrated. With the data analytics it can calculate statistical parameters and look for outliers or values that exceed averages or are outside of standard deviations. Look at high and low values and find anomalies there. Last but not least examine classification of data.

Question:

How computer-assisted audit software such as Audit Command Language (ACL) can assist in these investigations.