Detection of fraud in financial reporting of small and medium entities in the field of manufacturing industry

Abstract

The importance of forensic accounting has been growing in recent years, especially when it comes to small and medium enterprises (SMEs). These entities do not have sufficiently developed accounting functions, they do not invest enough in staff who are not consequently motivated to present certain items of financial statements in a precise manner and in accordance with accounting standards. This results in reporting errors. The other side of the coin are the manipulations that happen with the intention and goal of presenting better business than the real situation to banks and other stakeholders. In this research paper, Beneish's M-Score model with five variables (M5) was applied as a method of forensic accounting, in order to detect manipulations in SMEs from sector C-Manufacturing in Serbia. The sample includes 73 companies, and only for 3 of them the M (5) Score exceeded the reference value and indicated a high risk of manipulation. The situation is different when looking at model variables individually; however, the results of the Mann-Whitney test indicate that there is no statistically significant difference in the level of liquidity and profitability of a firm depending on whether an entity manipulated from the individual model variables point of view or not.