This weeks case study assignment is a special one. We will not focus on a specific case from the Case Studies in Forensic Accounting and Fraud Auditing textbook. Instead, go the SEC website and select a publicly-traded company to review and analyze for the week. Review the financial statements of the publicly-traded organization and identify accounts that may indicate potential irregularities. For analysis, you might want to consider evaluating accounts that have relationships such as accounts receivable and bad debt expense. Additionally, analyze the trends in related accounts to ascertain the accounts that do not follow a normal or expected pattern. The use of horizontal and vertical analysis can be really helpful in this area. If you perform a ratio analysis (recommended!) and if possible, compare your financial ratio results against the industry. There are three books that will help with the ratio comparison, including Industry Norms & Key Business Ratios by Dun & Bradstreet, Almanac of Business & Industrial Financial Ratios and RMA (Risk Management Association) Annual Statement Studies. However, if you are not able to gain access to one of these three books via the Gangwish Library, please select two similar companies and perform the same analysis. Then, evaluate your selected organization against the two comparable organizations and note any significant differences.

As you work through this assignment and gather evidence, be aware of your time and make sure not to review accounts that have minor trend deviations. Once you complete the analysis, identify those accounts (or questionable accounts) that may suggest further investigation. Explain why you might request additional information for the questionable accounts.

If I were to look at Target Corp, what would be accounts on their current financial statements that display irregularities?