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s more and more corruption cases are uncovered in Indonesia, the demand for forensic accounting skills is on the rise. This is evident in, among other things, the increasing number of universities that offer forensic accounting courses at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

Despite its growing popularity, many do not seem to understand the true nature and coverage of forensic accounting and are under the impression that the role of a forensic accountant is limited to auditing fraud.

Nevertheless, in reality, as demonstrated by the actual practice of forensic accounting around the globe, forensic accountants offer a much wider range of services in the areas of antifraud consultations, antifraud system designs, antitrust, divorce, bankruptcy, insurance claims, royalty audits, counterterrorist financing and expert witnessing, to name just a few.

In Indonesia, for example, banks are now required by Bank Indonesia (BI) to have an antifraud strategy as well as the required resources to minimize fraud risk in their organizations. Such a strategy should cover areas of prevention; detection; investigation, reporting and sanction, as well as monitoring, evaluation and follow-ups. To be able to design an appropriate antifraud strategy, bankers need forensic accounting skills to understand the nature and dynamics of fraud and decide the best strategy accordingly.

At one time, I was requested to give basic forensic accounting training to a group of new bankers at one of the major banks in Indonesia; I was surprised to find that most of them did not even have accounting backgrounds, but were required by their bank to understand the basics of forensic accounting.

The uniqueness of forensic accounting lies in the fact that it has no universal, agreed-upon, how-to procedures, which makes it more flexible than conventional accounting. Different organizations may use different procedures to deal with different cases.

There are a number of international guidelines and literature that suggest ways to conduct fraud examinations effectively and forensic accountants may choose to follow the ones they consider the most appropriate. For example, when the Supreme Audit Agency (BPK) released its second investigative report on the Hambalang graft case, it was believed that the information regarding the identities of a number of House of Representatives (DPR) members who were investigated by the board had been omitted from the final report.

In its defense, the BPK argued that all the information concerning the people under its investigation was included in the investigative worksheet (KKP), and only that information relevant to the purpose of the investigation was included in its investigative report (LHP).

In practice, some forensic accountants, under similar circumstances, may choose to include all the information gathered from their investigations into their investigative reports.

This is due to the fact that in many fraud investigations, the relevance of the information gathered may not be immediately known and, thus, '€œcompleteness'€ is considered the better option rather than '€œrelevance'€. This is not to say that the BPK'€™s decision to include only relevant information in its report was incorrect but instead we may assume that, presumably due to the nature of the case under investigation and other factors, the BPK believed that the '€œrelevance'€ of the information in the investigative report was a better measurement of quality as opposed to '€œcompleteness'€.

Another characteristic that sets forensic accounting apart from other accounting disciplines is its multidisciplinary nature in which, instead of relying only on accounting knowledge, it incorporates various fields of knowledge such as criminology, sociology, technology, business, finance and law to achieve its objectives.

For example, from a criminology point of view, a forensic accountant needs to assess the culture of the organization under investigation to determine whether or not it has a high social dominance orientation (SDO) where most, if not all, of its members are dominance seekers and, thus, more prone to corruption.

Evidence suggests that, for example, some public offices in Indonesia are known to be occupied by people with a high SDO. Although such a finding may indicate competitiveness, studies suggest that high SDO groups will be more prone to corruption than those with low SDOs.

The belief that dominance is everything, makes people in high positions mistakenly think that they are entitled to greater power, authority, status and money as well as the right to obtain and preserve them by any means necessary.

Bribery involving high-ranking public officials in Indonesia can be seen an example of a misleading sense of entitlement for extensive wealth due to their perceived status as superior to other people in the country. Such a sense of entitlement is commonly used to rationalize their corrupt acts so as to avoid guilt.

An organization with a high SDO commonly has high fraud risk and, therefore, a forensic accountant needs to be ready for the possibility that there might be systematic corruption in the organization, which means that there may also be a systematic effort to hinder his or her investigation.

From a sociology perspective, a forensic accountant, when dealing with an organization with systematic corruption, needs to gain a sufficient understanding of how every actor interacts with one another in the corruption network.

He or she needs to conduct a so-called '€œsocial network analysis'€ to determine who in the network has the highest '€œbetweenness centrality'€ (i.e. is the most powerful), the highest '€œdegree centrality'€ (i.e. the most active) and the highest '€œcloseness centrality'€ (i.e. the one with the quickest access to others) to decide, among other things, the manner and the order of the investigative interview.

So far as the principle of fraud investigations is concerned, those who are considered the main actors in a fraud scheme will likely be interviewed last.

In conclusion, forensic accounting is an extremely broad field, which is not suitable for those with closed minds or faint hearts. It will continuously and rapidly change over time and, it is hoped, will be part of the cure for the corruption cancer in Indonesia.

The writer is the director of the Center for Forensic Accounting Studies at the accounting program of the Islamic University of Indonesia. He obtained his master'€™s and PhD in forensic accounting from the University of Wollongong, Australia.