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I am pleased to write this foreword to the Fraud Examination Casebook with Documents: A Hands‐on Approach by William H. Beecken and Clark A. Beecken, a redoubtable father‐son team of forensic accountants. Bill has been a seasoned forensic professional employed many years with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) Office of Inspector General, as well as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). Clark is currently working as a forensic auditor for the federal government.

Several years ago, as a faculty member in the School of Accountancy at Kennesaw State University (KSU), I came to know Bill as a popular faculty member at Southern Polytechnic State University – now the KSU Marietta campus – who taught forensic accounting in an innovative way. At the end of his course, it was part of the students' end‐of‐term assignment to go through the real‐world experience of being deposed as an “expert witness” by the local district attorney and overseen by a judge in the actual environs of the Marietta, Georgia, courthouse. A couple of times, I was a member of the audience in the courthouse, rather envious of Bill's students who were being exposed to a mock‐trial scenario. Hence, I enthusiastically commend and recommend Bill's idiosyncratic interpretation of a hands‐on approach!

From my very first meeting, Clark appeared to be a chip off the old block, cut of the same cloth, the apple that doesn't fall far from the tree, etc. – sharp, incisive, and blessed with the technological adeptness and adroitness that comes with having grown up digital. So, I am not surprised that he has left his indelible mark on the book by focusing on Microsoft Excel, the industry standard for spreadsheets, featuring calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables, and such.

Among other things, this practical fraud casebook does a wonderful job of showing how Excel PivotTables may be profitably deployed – not only to summarize a huge amount of data but also to help trace Excel Pivot red flags back to source documents to understand the flow of money. After all, much of forensic accounting can be usefully described as the work of understanding and investigating people, money, and associated patterns of behavior with great tenacity – colloquially described as the “follow the money” approach. Such work cannot be carried out without sophisticated data analysis in today's data rich, information poor (DRIP) world.

It is one thing to appreciate the scope and reach of forensic accounting at a conceptual level; quite another to get your hands dirty with data, and recognize the power of data‐driven insights and solutions. This book admirably makes that bridge from theory to practice happen. Rather than “hand waving,” you become hands‐on – you don't just talk, for talk is cheap, but you actually perform analyses and learn to manipulate data statistically to yield relevant and meaningful information. This information helps you gather evidence and arrive at inferences that support or challenge your hypotheses – a most exciting endeavor. After all, it is such information that can greatly help buttress one's arguments, defend one's position, persuade others in courtroom contexts, and thus, help win cases.

Dr. Sridhar Ramamoorti, ACA, CPA/CITP/CFF/CGMA, CIA, CFSA, CGAP, CRMA, CFE, CGFM, CRP, MAFF

Associate Professor of Accounting, School of Business Administration, University of Dayton, Ohio

Managing Principal, The Behavioral Forensics Group, LLC (www.bringingfreudtofraud.com)

MEMBERSHIPS

Standing Advisory Group, Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, 2014–2016

Forensic Accounting Advisory Board, Georgia Southern University, 2015–

Board of Trustees, Financial Executives Research Foundation, 2016–

Litigation Forensics Board, National Association of Certified Valuators & Analysts, 2016–

Lead author, A.B.C.'s of Behavioral Forensics (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2013)