Adefila, Kasum and Olaniyi (2006), assertion is that fraud and corrupt practices is globally endemic. However, the rate at which public and private office holders in developing economics, Nigeria inclusive perpetrate financial malpractice is dangerously alarming. These people embezzles public fund not minding whatever consequences their activities may have on the citizens of the country and users of the financial statement report.
On the other hand the auditors that are suppose to defect and prevent fraud
could not do that fully because they (auditors) believe that fraud detection
and prevention is their secondary assignment thereby not paying full attention
to it. This attitude of there’s has created a very big expectation gap which is
a gap between the auditors actual standard of performance and the various
public expectations of auditors performance. Hence a call for a robust and
bigger techniques to detect and prevent fraud arised, they called them forensic
accountant.
Forensic accountants are somehow
connected to auditors but they go beyond the practice of auditors, doing things
auditors could not do. Conventional audit techniques cannot be guaranteed to
detect fraud all the time because of the limitations inherent in the modern
audit process, but the introduction of forensic accountants has bridged the
audit expectation gap. The forensic accountant is a blood hound of book keeping
as opposed to a watch dog associated with an auditor-they sniff out fraud and
criminal transactions in our public and private sectors financial records. They
hound for the conclusive evidences. External auditors find out the deliberate
misstatements only but the forensic accountants take a more proactive,
skeptical approach to examining the books of accounting.
They make no
assumptions of management integrity, show less concerns for arithmetical
accuracy and have nothing to do with assurance standards but are kin in
exposing fraud (Anwar, 2008) therefore, the relevance of a forensic accountant
to fraud detection and prevention in the public sectors and private sectors is
that they help identify and investigates suspicious or fraudulent claims and
provides expert witness services. A forensic accountant also handles financial
and forensic accounting issues. Its important again is the conducts of fraud
investigation and analysis. Also, a forensic accountant identifies existing and
emerging fraud risk. The relevance of a forensic accountant to fraud detection
and prevention in the public sectors and private sectors in Nigeria cannot be
underemphasized.