When I qualified as a Chartered Accountant in the latter part of the 20th century, I decided that I didn't see my future in audits and accounts preparation and was open to something more 'exciting'. I found a role as a fraud investigator with what was then the Inland Revenue, investigating and, where relevant, prosecuting cases of suspected serious tax fraud.
The role involved assisting tax inspector colleagues in their own investigations, running my own investigations (which included those of accounting firms themselves who were suspected of aiding and abetting their clients in evading (rather than avoiding) their tax obligations) and carrying out the occasional 'dawn raid' to collect evidence.
In that role, I have been threatend by irate taxpayers, often when their tax evasion activities were laid bare and was once chased by an irate lady, who had just admitted to her substantial unpaid tax liabilities, who was brandishing a meat cleaver. Fortunately, her husband caught her before she caught up with me. Another client asked whether I could have the investigating tax inspector 'killed' but persuaded him to take a less violent route by following the rules. By the end of that particular enquiry, the inspector and my client had managed to see each other's point of view and were amicable to one another. Life in auditing was never like this.
After my time with the Inland Revenue, I worked in senior managerial roles with two of the Big 4 accounting firms, focusing on tax investigations and what came to be called 'forensic accounting' assignments.
As a mathematician, I see every new case in which I am instructed as a puzzle to be solved and the skills required to do this are wide - understanding people, and persuading them to sometimes give up their innermost thoughts in order to find out what has occured; delving deep into accounting systems to find out how processes operated and identifying the flaws in them which led to fraud being perpetrated; finding ways to reconstruct underlying accounting records which had been inadvertantly set on fire, stolen, lost, water damaged or eaten by the dog, all designed to break the evidential trail. And then, of course, is the ability to prepare clear, concise, reports that explain what we have been instructed to do, the work we have carried out, and to present a summary of findings. Sometimes, we are also required to give oral evidence before a court.
And, for those instances in which we are instructed in criminal matters, meetings with the prosecuting authority (which, having been on that side of the 'fence', gives me a particular insight into their aims and frustrations in upholding the law) or meetings with the accused (sometimes via a visit to them in prison) and, again, we meet 'interesting' people.
Life as a forensic accountant is never dull!
Barry Draper April 2025