What’s the coolest thing about IT audit?
THE coolest thing, by far, is Benford’s Law, made famous by somebody called Law although allegedly discovered and published some 50 years earlier by a shy, retiring Mr. Newcomb. These clever geezers noticed that individual digits are not evenly distributed in series of numbers such as columns in a typical spreadsheet. Essentially, more numbers start with a 1 than start with a 2, more start with 2 than 3, and so on up to 9 (ignoring leading zeroes). This pattern has a statistical basis (logarithmic, I’m told) that makes it possible to compare the distribution of digits in a given series of numbers to what would be expected by chance, and (this is the cool bit) spot anomalies that may indicate a fraudster at work (making up numbers with a bias towards higher initial digits, perhaps) or some other factor affecting the digital distribution that could be equally interesting. Here’s a simple way to visualise Benford’s Law: look through any large document that contains numbered lists. Every l
