The Whole, Not the Parts: Discovering fraud with outcome-oriented auditing

Outcome-oriented fraud auditing - looking at a situation as a whole rather than its individual parts - will help you think like a fraudster and find deeply embedded crimes.

A retired federal auditor's instruction to focus on the whole and not just the parts of a fraud audit has helped me find fraud in numerous situations that I probably would have overlooked. Let me tell you about one case in which the auditor's advice helped me find thousands of dollars in well-hidden overcharges.