BENFORD’S LAW IN THE CASE OF HUNGARIAN WHOLE-SALE TRADE SECTOR

Abstract

Benford’s law has attracted many researchers for detecting the fraudulent data and can be used as one of the digital analysis tools for auditing of the accounting data. In this treatise, the accuracy of figures reported in Hungarian Trading Companies’ data are examined through digital analysis technique with the consideration of Benford’s Law. The net sales data from the period of year 2009 to 2014 has been used for detecting the anomalies and to confirm whether the digit-pattern follows Benford’s distribution. Through the obtained results we claimed that the frequencies of first and second digits’ place follow the Benford’s theoretical distribution and exhibits to close conformity. Moreover analysis of the second, first-order and second-order gave a mixed result of close conformity to significant deviation from expected frequency. Also the absolute deviation (MAD) value of first and second digit suggest an overall conformity of the data to Benford’s distribution.

Keywords

• Benford’s Law
• Sectoral Analysis
• Mean Absolute Deviation