Forensic accounting in financial fraud control in digital media: A Research on independent auditors

Assuming different structures and characteristics day by day, technology exposes businesses to more and more interaction with digital media. While providing businesses with such advantages as time and cost saving on one hand, keeping business data on digital media, on the other hand, has also given rise to a novel fraud technique. It is called financial fraud. 3M theory and competence factor play an importance role in financial fraud and this has led to a new profession to stand out in controlling financial fraud in digital media. Technological developments have caused an increase in sophisticated matters in businesses, have made strategic decisions more significant and thus have allowed forensic audit reports and forensic accounting to be more important in solving dealing with these challenges. This study tries to research whether core competences and characteristics of forensic accounts are effective in financial fraud control in digital media. For this purpose, a survey was conducted on the auditors of auditing companies with authority to publish transparency report in Public Oversight Accounting and Auditing Standards Authority (KGK) and thus it was concluded that in fraud control in digital media, core competences and characteristics of the auditors regarded as forensic accounts are close to those of foreign forensic accounts but there is no forensic accounting software for financial frauds in digital media and operations are conducted over the auditing software for financial fraud control. It was found that forensic accounting profession is still at development stage in Turkey without any sufficient infrastructure. It was also observed out of the research data that forensic accounting is effective in internal control and quality financial reporting. Key Words: Forensic accounting, forensic audit report, financial fraud, 3M theory, digital media, competence element,