Does Benfords Law really work?
Michael: I’ve never used it but I was intrigued and did read up on it. I don’t mean to talk through my hat on this, but my opinion is that I think it’s a valuable analysis but should not be the only analysis, and that there are some things to consider in running the analysis. Invoices, sales orders, purchase orders, manufacturing work orders, etc. – these are documents where an Enterprise Resource Planning system would normally automatically assign an identifier, and sometimes the identifier is compound, consisting of a prefix and a suffix, where the prefix could be an alpha-numeric. Thus, the analysis has to be on the prefix and suffix, not just the suffix alone which could repeat across prefixes. Further, one must know the starting value of the auto-assigned identifier. For example, in an ERP conversion, when the new ERP system goes live all purchase orders might start at the 4000-level identification mark to distinguish them from those generated by the older ERP system where the pur
