Role of Forensic Accounting in Curbing Creative Accounting Practices—An Empirical Study

Abstract

Forensic accounting is one of the modern domains of accounting that incorporates special knowledge and a group of skills that are utilized to fight financial corruption and creative accounting, support legal action against such practices and tackle the resulting consequences. The research at hand investigates fundamental perceptions of forensic accounting and discusses methods that forensic accounting uses to detect and curb creative accounting. It also emphasizes the concept of creative accounting, discusses its types and outcomes, and illustrates the techniques of forensic accounting that are used to fight it. A well-structured, five-point Likert style questionnaire was constructed and distributed among a sample of 350 CPAs from the total population of Certified Public Accountants in Mount Lebanon and Beirut Governorates. The researchers used the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) to make various statistical tests to analyze the outputs. The research yielded some important findings, mainly that both the integrated and the dimensional audit approaches, which are two forensic accounting methods, lead to curbing creative accounting practices. As a result, the researchers had some recommendations.