Random the Book

Questions for you:

• When I review numbers in reports or data, do I have any instinct for what “natural” distributions should look like?
• Have I ever noticed that data seemed suspiciously neat or evenly distributed?
• Do I understand the basic principle well enough to explain why fabricated numbers often fail this test?

Questions for your organisation:

• Do our auditing and compliance teams use statistical tests like Benford’s Law to detect potential fraud?
• When we receive data from external partners or internal teams, do we have mechanisms to identify unnaturally regular patterns?
• Are our financial controls sophisticated enough to catch manipulation that creates statistical anomalies?