History Main / ForensicAccounting

** ''Film/BatmanBegins'' has Rachel's boss stumble onto the League of Shadows' plan after he discovered a cargo ship had arrived in Gotham's port with one more cargo container than its manifest said it embarked with. Unfortunately a couple of {{Dirty Cop}}s off him before he is able to tell anyone.
** The film shows Alfred and Bruce trying to reduce the risk of this happening while gathering supplies to create his equipment. Someone ordering a single, very specific item would raise suspicion and leave an obvious trail. Someone ordering 10,000 of them is just a routine business order that no-one would pay attention to.

--->'''Bruce Wayne''' ''[after Alfred explains this to him, [[DeadpanSnarker wryly]]]'' At least we'll have spares.

-->Friday night, you and your boys went out to eat, oh
-->Then they hung out
-->But you came home around three
-->Yes, you did
-->If six of y'all went out, ah
-->Then four of you were really cheap, yeah
-->'Cause only two of you had dinner
-->I found your credit card receipt

* ''Series/{{Castle}}'': Whether it yields a lead or not, most episodes will at least mention checking someone's financials. One episode has the team trying to find out who a slain plastic surgeon's last mystery patient was. Castle's solution is to get a warrant for the hospital's billing records to see who paid for the thing, noting that billing is "the one department where ''nothing'' falls through the cracks."

* Hisashi Midoriya in ''Fanfic/OneForAllAndEightForTheNine'' works for the Yaoyorozu Corporation as a forensic accountant, helping them save millions of yen from corrupt executives. He's known as the "Dragon of San Francisco" because of this - and of how he's the only person that could crack [[ArbitrarilyLargeBankAccount Nezu's finances]] (even if he later tacked a note saying "you don't want to know" regarding their procedence. [[spoiler:At Ochako's behest, he and his team investigate Shoowaysha Publishing, allowing them to discover the existence of the Meta Liberation Army. Their report was only one day too late to prevent the MLA's uprising.]]

* An instance of EnemyChatter in ''VideoGame/BatmanArkhamKnight'' has a downplayed version of this happening, where one {{mook}} says that he's persuaded Batman is secretly backed by the government because "who else can afford all this stuff?", the second mook suggests that Bruce Wayne could, only for the first to [[IfOnlyYouKnew dismiss the idea as ridiculous]].

** ''Shadows of Yog-Sothoth'' adventure "Devil's Canyon". While examining the papers in von Varnstein's office, if one of the {{PC}}s makes an Accounting roll he can discover an order for special camera lenses. This is a clue that tells the {{PC}}s that the camera lenses they discover later are important.

*** Adventure "The Dreamer". While searching Herbert Whitefield's office, the {{PC}}s can find bills and receipts. If one of them makes an Accounting roll, he can determine that Whitefield is deeply in debt and late on all his payments - a clue that gives him a motive in the disappearance of his client Paul [=LeMond=].
*** Adventure "Mountains of the Moon". If the {{PC}}s break into the NWI mining office's administration building and Johnathan Harris' office, they can find the site's business records. A successful Accounting roll will discover that even though the operation is performing at peak efficiency, it's still losing a phenomenal amount of money. This is an important clue that the purpose of the site is not to make money and that there's something unusual going on.
** ''Cthulhu Now'' adventure "The Killer Out Of Space". If a PC makes an Accounting roll while examining the books (accounting records) at Buddy's Best Wrex, he realizes that they aren't correct. The books are actually false: Buddy keeps the real books at home.
** ''Dreamlands'' adventure "Pickman's Student". While going through Blakely's papers, a {{PC}} can make an Accounting Roll. If he succeeds he finds receipts for four of Blakely's paintings, with the addresses of the people who bought them. Since the {{PC}}s must find the paintings in order to succeed, this is a vitally important clue.

** ''The Asylum and Other Tales'' adventure "The Asylum". In Dr. Freygan's bedroom, there's a wall safe behind a ConcealingCanvas. It holds an account book listing the asylum's income and expenses. If a {{PC}} makes an Accounting roll, he will realize that there's no way the asylum's income could cover its expenses. This is a clue that Dr. Freygan is making money another way: by helping bootleggers smuggle alcohol.

*** Chapter 1 "New York". A lawyer named Bradley Grey handled the legal work of passing control of the Carlyle fortune to Erica Carlyle. If a {{PC}} succeeds in an Accounting skill roll while reading the records of the turnover, they will discover that he is her lawyer. The {{PC}}s can then contact Grey and ask him to get them in contact with her.
*** Chapter 4 "Kenya". If a {{PC}} makes an Accounting roll while reading Ahja Singh's ledger, they discover listings of shipments to addresses in Hong Kong, London and Egypt. These are important clues that will allow them to investigate a world wide (and world-threatening) Franchise/CthulhuMythos conspiracy.

* ''TabletopGame/{{Rolemaster}}'' ''Shadow World'' setting, supplement ''Kingdom of the Desert Jewel''. Kohan Traska, the Advisor on Internal Affairs, has a room in the Royal Palace in the Gethryn capital city of Ketaum. Among his papers is a list of the revenue from trade items sent to the capital from the nome (province) of Shii-Magna. If the {{PC}}s analyze it, they can discover that the totals have been skewed in the nome's favor. This is because Traska was born in Shii-Magna and is a friend of its Karsha (governor). The [=GreatKing=] (ruler) of Gethrya would be interested in this (to say the least).

** In the adventure "A Thousand Words", Powder used a layered series of withdrawals to remove the funds from his bank account to pay for the warehouse. If the {{PC}}s can read the books and do some computer hacking, they can find out what he did, which will give them his current location.
** In the adventure under "Government Purity Goes Down", the {{PC}}s must investigate the disappearance of Jessop Hills' government education funds by examining the books of the City of Los Angeles school board' and finding out who's siphoning off the money.

* In ''Film/TheAccountant'' the protagonist is one, though he generally works for criminals to find out who's been pilfering their ill-gotten gains. The investigator after him finally gets a break by using the same trope to discover his money-laundering fronts.

* In ''LightNovel/CopCraft'', after Tilarna speculates that two deceased cops may have been controlled by an extremely concentrated dose of fairy dust, another investigator brings up the point that long-term use of such a drug would have been noticed. She brings up the fact that a gold charm can be used to amplify the effects, but that such an object would be beyond the skills of any craftsmen in her world due to the tolerances of such a thing being so stringent. Kei Matoba then realizes that it could be created not by a person, but by a pre-programmed CNC (computerized numerical control) machine, so he starts looking into any purchases of such devices in the city and finds out a shady club owner has recently bought one.

* In Volume 10 of ''LightNovel/SwordArtOnline,'' Asuna, Sinon, Leafa, and Yui figure that their best hope of finding out [[spoiler:where the Rath Corporation has taken Kirito after his poisoning by Johnny Black]] is to do a deep dive analysis of Japanese government spending since they've had no success otherwise due to its extreme secrecy and almost non-existent presence on the Internet. Yui eventually discovers an oddly large budget allocated for a Japanese underwater mining ship anchored near the Izu Islands, roughly 200 miles south of Tokyo. [[spoiler:Said location is indeed where Kirito was taken, and it is actually an advanced offshore platform hosting a network of quantum computers for the purposes of military AI creation, being done in secret to avoid American surveillance.]] Unfortunately in the anime adaptation, Yui's forensic investigation was almost entirely AdaptedOut.

* An instance of EnemyChatter in ''Videogame/BatmanArkhamKnight'' has a downplayed version of this happening, where one {{mook}} says that he's persuaded Batman is secretly backed by the government because "who else can afford all this stuff?", the second mook suggests that Bruce Wayne could, only for the first to [[IfOnlyYouKnew dismiss the idea as ridiculous]].

[[folder:Web Comics]]

* ''Literature/VorkosiganSaga'':
** In ''Literature/{{Komarr}}'', Miles has definite evidence that a plot exists, but no idea what the plot is ''about'', so he calls in some [=ImpSec=] analysts to see if they can reverse-engineer the plan from the purchase orders.
** In ''Literature/TheBordersOfInfinity'' Miles has his mercenary accountants infiltrate the enemy prison camp offices in order to facilitate the major operation he has planned there.

* In the ''Series/{{Monk}}'' episode "Mr. Monk is On the Run," the heroes try to determine who's trying to frame Adrian for murder. They ultimately do so by tracing a phony check back to its source, going through various fake corporations until they land on an actual name--in this case, Monk's ArchEnemy Dale [[FatBastard "the Whale"]] Biederbeck.
* Used frequently in ''Series/NCISLosAngeles'' (typically Eric's and Nell's job), though one episode put a twist on it: LAPD was only too happy to hand over an investigation to them because the suspect was old-school, using all-paper records instead of easily searchable computers. Boxes and boxes of them.