Invoice AuditorGlossary › Benford's Law
QuickBooks books-integrity glossary
Benford's Law
Benford's Law is a mathematical observation that in many naturally occurring collections of numbers, the leading digit is likely to be small — about 30% start with 1, declining to about 5% starting with 9.
Benford's Law has been used by forensic accountants for decades as a screen for fabricated or manipulated financial data. Real spending follows the pattern; invented numbers tend to spread too evenly across digits because people faking amounts don't know the math. Invoice Auditor runs a Benford's Law screen (called the first-digit screen) on every scan — it reads every bill amount in the file, compares the leading-digit distribution to the expected pattern, and only raises a flag when the drift is genuine and the file is large enough for the pattern to be reliable. On a normal file, it stays silent.
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