A Model for Identifying Physical Notes and Documents Suspected of Fraud: Based on Their Appearance

Fraud is the result of a manipulation of the organization's processes with the intent to misuse it so that the fraudster or fraudsters disrupt the organization's internal controls and the organization's processes are altered. Detection of fraud can be done both at the level of financial statements and analysis of financial ratios and at the level of accounting documents. Many books have been written and researched about the red flags revealed in the analysis of items of financial statements to detect fraud, but studies show that no research has been done on the level of documents in the field of accounting. So the purpose of this study is to identify the physical characteristics of documents suspected of being forged to provide a checklist of these characteristics. With the help of this checklist, it is possible to identify fraudulent documents more easily from their appearance 

In this research, descriptive phenomenological qualitative research method has been used and data analysis has been done by using content analysis method and to achieve this goal, Colaizzi seven-step method has been used. In this regard, 19 experts from the official experts of the Judiciary and Justice, auditors of the Court of Accounts and members of the Iranian Society of Certified Public Accountants, financial managers of companies and CEOs of financial services institutions were interviewed in late 2020. The duration of the interview with each of them varied between 20 minutes to 5 hours. In the interview with the sixteenth person, there was practically theoretical saturation; That is, there was no new concept of interviewing people 17, 18, and 19, and they repeated the same concepts mentioned by the previous people. Then the key points raised by them were coded and categorized in the form of concepts and categories. 

In this study, 98 characteristics of suspected documents were identified, which were in the form of three categories: 1- Almost perfect documents but with an inconsistent appearance compared to other similar documents in the same historical range (documents that are almost perfect are not completely free of fraud in practice, because the fraudster always tries to commit fraud in the name of documents Therefore, it is likely that it will complete more than required documents and extra signatures outside the operational cycle.Documents that, although seemingly perfect, look different from other similar documents in the same historical area. Are and fall into the first category), 2- Incomplete document,3- Contradictory documents with other information. 

Documents suspected of fraud are documents that are incomplete, distorted, obscure, inconsistent with other information or almost perfect but with an inconsistent appearance compared to other similar documents within the same time period due to inaccurate regulation or Facing the limitations. The appearance of fraudulent documents is largely a clue to detect fraud .The findings of this study provide a good model. The list of appearance characteristics obtained for documents suspected of fraud in this study are important clues and provide a suitable model for internal and external auditors, managers and regulatory bodies so that they can more easily identify such documents and Detect fraud.