History Main / ForensicAccounting

* This is also how they brought down [[UsefulNotes/TheMafia Joe Massino]], boss of the Bonanno crime family. Jack Stubing, an FBI agent assigned to investigate the Bonanno family operations, was aware of the measures Massino used to avoid scrutiny compared to his peers at the time. He therefore decided to go after Massino with a rear-guard action by convincing his bosses to lend him a pair of forensic accountants normally used in fraud investigations, believing that they could easily pinpoint conspirators in the family's racketeering schemes. Stubing believed that long prison sentences would be sufficient to get anybody to turn informer, and thus make it easier to trace how the money flowed back to Massino. Ultimately, they managed to get Salvatore Vitale (Massino's brother-in-law and underboss), already irate that Massino planned to kill him, to turn informer.

* In the ''WesternAnimation/BatmanTheAnimatedSeries'' episode "The Mechanic", Arnold Rundle, an employee in the orders receiving department of an auto parts company, comes to Penguin with a pile of records. One is a list of every time the Batmobile was publicly known to be damaged; the other is a set of orders for the specialized parts that would be needed to repair the damage to the Batmobile. The money trail leads to Earl Cooper's garage. As thanks Penguin sends Rundle on a sewer sea cruise via rubber ducky boat. [[spoiler:Later, Batman has his "backers" (cough) set up some dummy companies to prevent Earl and his daughter from being tracked again.]]

* 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.

** Near the end of the first game, [[StudentCouncilPresident Towa]] is revealed to have been secretly conducting a long-term audit of the [[MegaCorp Reinford Group's]] production numbers of refining raw iron ore into solid steel by comparing company sales figures to government reports on mine productivity. The numbers turn out to be way off because as it turns out, every shipment of iron ore that has come out of the mines for the past several years has had a small amount smuggled out and dumped onto the black market. The amount missing adds up to 100,000 [[FantasticMeasurementSystem torim]], or, enough to build [[OhCrap 2,000 tanks.]] [[spoiler: The smuggled metal was actually used to build the ''Pantagruel'', the 250-arge long [[CoolShip command airship]] of the Noble Alliance.]]
** In ''Cold Steel III'', Major Claire Rieveldt reveals that she has a seriously DarkAndTroubledPast when [[spoiler: she tells Rean the story of how she came to serve Chancellor Osborne. It all began after her parents and brother were killed in a car accident and her uncle's family took over the Rieveldt family business. While going through her deceased father's old belongings, she finds a stack of account books for the company and discovers that her uncle has been defrauding customers by selling cheap imported knockoffs of product at full price. This leads to a long chain of events that results in her tearing down her uncle's name, reputation, and business, and eventually his life when she gets him into trouble with many powerful nobles and leads to the death penalty for him. And her quest for vengeance was all started by Osborne's planting the idea in her head.]]

--> -- '''Alan Parker''', ''VideoGame/AlphaProtocol''

* 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 ''Anime/CodeGeass R2'', after toppling the Chinese Federation, Lelouch reveals to C.C. he had an ulterior method for destroying one of the world's three superpowers: he is searching for the headquarters of the Geass Order, and needed access to the records and resources of the Chinese to trace their movements using indirect methods such as shipments of supplies, power surges, unusual activity, etc. And their headquarters does turn out to be in far western China in the UsefulNotes/{{Xinjiang}} region.

[[folder:ComicBooks]]
* While the precise procedure is not shown on-screen, this is how ComicBook/RasAlGhul was able to find Franchise/{{Batman}}'s real identity. As he explains on his EstablishingCharacterMoment (which includes ''standing right in the Bat-Cave as he's doing so, having snuck up on Bruce''), a thorough examination of Bruce Wayne's expenses revealed some incongruencies, which were the purchases of the Bat-gear.
* Justice Department in ''Comicbook/{{Judge Dredd}}'' has an entire accounts division, who handle both the Department's accounts and all manner of financial crime investigations.

[[folder:FanFic]]
* Euphie's power in ''FanFic/AColdCalculus''. Upon her appointment as Viceroy of Area 11, she uproots the corruption in her administration and even uses it to figure out such things as: how the resistance cells procured Glasgows, the existence of Clovis' secret project, the source of Refrain in the country and [[spoiler:the existence of the Geass Directorate.]]

[[folder:Film]]

* In the film adaptation of ''Film/VForVendetta'', Detective Inspector Finch decides to go through government tax records while trying to find out details about the terrorist V. This thread of investigation eventually leads to him uncovering sensitive details about the conspiracy the Norsefire party used to bring itself to power. (In the original comic Finch got the information from the FATE supercomputer, which wasn't in the movie.)
-->'''Finch''': One thing is true of all governments; the most accurate records are the tax records.
* ''Film/TheDarkKnightTrilogy'':

** 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.

* The film ''Film/AllThePresidentsMen'' made the phrase "Follow the money" a part of the political lexicon and popular culture. In the film, it is whispered to reporter Bob Woodward by [[MysteriousInformant Deep Throat]] as a way to cut through the lies and deceptions and find the truth about the [[UsefulNotes/RichardNixon Watergate scandal]]. This is a [[BeamMeUpScotty fictionalized line]] created by the movie, but nevertheless catches the spirit of the process perfectly.

* In ''Film/JackRyanShadowRecruit'', Ryan is an analyst who examines the stock market and other financial transactions for links to terrorism.
* In ''[[Film/CasinoRoyale2006 Casino Royale]]'' MI-6 uncovers a plot to sabotage the maiden flight of a new airliner when an analyst notices someone has shorted large amounts of airline and aircraft manufacturer stocks.

* Shows up often in the ''Literature/JohnPutnamThatcher'' series by Emma Lathen. [[JustifiedTrope Justifiably so]], since the AmateurSleuth in question is an investment banker.

* In ''Literature/AnansiBoys'', Charlie Nancy's employer Grahame Coates tries to frame Charlie for his own dirty dealings. Charlie is arrested, but released without ever going to trial, because the police are able to correctly deduce from the agency's financial records that Charlie had been framed, and couldn't be responsible. To wit, Coates has the nasty habit of firing employees just before they qualify for severance, Charlie being an unprecedented exception. Coates' turnover rates are all that's needed to conclusively identify him as the thief (well, that and the embezzling started ''before'' Charlie started working for him)...
* In a ''Literature/LordDarcy'' mystery, Lord Darcy observes that while trying to solve a murder occurring on a train, another detective was led astray because his experience is in this, where conspiracies are easy to form and hard to figure out.

* ''Literature/TheDresdenFiles: Literature/{{Changes}}'' has Harry, Susan, and Martin locate some Red Court vampires by... searching through shipping manifests and finding two inventories: one for costumes to be used in a ritual, and a request for replacements, since the first delivery ''didn't make it''.
* Literature/SherlockHolmes once found a man FakingTheDead when he discovered he'd been writing checks for very large amounts of money to an unknown man, presumably himself under a false name. He'd intended to do so both to avoid paying his bills and pin the murder on the son of a woman who'd refused him decades earlier.
* In Creator/AndrewVachss' ''ComicBook/{{Batman}}'' novel, ''Batman: The Ultimate Evil'', Alfred reveals to Bruce that Martha Wayne had worked as an investigative sociologist and had uncovered evidence of sex trafficking in Gotham City. Bruce specifically notes that she had tracked the financial records of the traffickers and even uses the phrase "follow the dollars".
* ''Literature/HaltingState'' has Elaine, sent by the insurance company she works for to make sure that a reported robbery isn't a case of one of their customers trying to cover up some WhiteCollarCrime.
* In the later novels of Creator/TomClancy's [[Literature/JackRyan Ryanverse]] Jack Ryan Jr. begins his career at The Campus as a forensic accountant, looking for suspicious patterns in financial transactions that may be linked to terrorist groups.
* In Literature/{{Dracula}}, this is Johnathan Harker's contribution to hunting the titular vampire. Harker, a business lawyer by trade, is able to trace Dracula directly to his home by studying Dracula's invoices and business correspondence.
* In Literature/{{Worm}}, both sides of the law have people with powers that easily lend themselves to this (usually people with Thinker ratings; they have enhanced mental processing abilities). It's one of the earliest ways of telling that there's a new Tinker (GadgeteerGenius types) in town; they are gear-dependent and the money and materials to build said equipment has to come from and go to somewhere. There exists an entire organisation, WATCHDOG, that exists to track macro scale financial crimes like how the major criminals (who as stated above invariably employ Thinkers of their own) get their funding and if possible shut them down.

[[folder:Live Action TV]]
* One episode of ''Series/{{Castle}}'' had the team trying to find out who a slain plastic surgeon's last mystery patient was. Castle's solution was 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."
** Whether it yields a lead or not, most episodes will at least mention checking someone's financials.
* Happens rarely (and usually off-screen at that) in ''Series/CriminalMinds.'' In one case, they were tracking a hitman who was killing his former clients, and managed to find both the hitman and said clients via tracing financial "investments" that fit his established fee.
* ''Series/StargateSG1'': "Politics" had [[CorruptPolitician Senator Kinsey]] get read into the stargate project after, in his capacity as chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, he demanded to know what the heck the $7.5 billion item in the Air Force budget labeled "Area 52" was.

* ''Series/TheGoodWife'': "Waiting for the Knock" has one of Lockhart/Gardner's major clients, drug dealer Lemond Bishop, come under threat of arrest. Their bankruptcy court-appointed trustee, an accountant by training, is brought in to help them figure out what's going on.
* ''Franchise/StarTrek'':
** Variation: The ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'' episode "[[{{Recap/StarTrekTheNextGenerationS2E18UpTheLongLadder}} Up The Long Ladder]]" has this scene:
-->'''Data:''' Captain, I have been considering the problem of the missing ship. Although there is no record of a launch to the Ficus sector, which would not be unusual considering the chaos of the early twenty second century, someone had to load that ship.\\
'''Picard:''' The manifest.\\
'''Data:''' Yes, sir.\\
'''Picard:''' There it is. SS ''Mariposa'', loaded 27th November, 2123.
** In the ''Series/StarTrekDeepSpaceNine'' episode "[[{{Recap/StarTrekDeepSpaceNineS03E03TheHouseOfQuark}} The House of Quark]]", Quark analyzes Grilka's finances and determines that D'Ghor has been trying to destroy her House by manipulating them into bankruptcy. This backfires because he's dealing with Klingons, who are completely uninterested in following his financial explanation, and demand that the accusation be settled with a TrialByCombat.
* In the gimmick TV series ''Series/PushNevada'' the protagonist is an IRS accountant who found discrepancies in the books of a casino.

* In ''Series/TheWire'' tracing dirty money is one of the specialties of Lester Freamon, who also instructs his fellow police in the art. This police work usually meets a stern opposition from the higher-ups, since drug money funds political campaigns, but the few times he can use it, he compares it to a BoomHeadshot.
-->'''Lester:''' [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShWe-4mtV8w You follow drugs and you find drug addicts and drug dealers, you follow the money and you don't know where the fuck it's gonna take you.]]
* On ''Series/{{Suits}}'' this is one of Louis Litt's specialties. He can work his way through mounds of legal paperwork and figure out exactly who owns what and who is paying whom. In a flashback he easily figures out an embezzlement scam from looking at some financial documents over lunch and even correctly points out that someone is being set up as a FallGuy. This turns into a subversion when he also fails to realize that he is the fall guy in question.

* More than half the cases on ''Series/WhiteCollar'' involve taking a look at the books somewhere in the episode. It's right there in the name. Peter was hired by the FBI on the strength of his accounting skills, which is very much TruthInTelevision.

* Usually a turning point in ''Series/MidsomerMurders'' to reveal that the victim was being blackmailed/a blackmailer.
* ''Series/BuffyTheVampireSlayer''. In "[[Recap/BuffyTheVampireSlayerS3E21GraduationDayPart1 Graduation Day Part 1]]", the Scoobies track down Faith this way, by finding the apartment the Mayor has rented for her. In the ''Series/{{Angel}}'' spin-off, Team Angel use the same method to track down where Wolfram & Hart have stashed Darla.
* ''Series/Daredevil2015'': Much of Karen Page's investigation into Wilson Fisk concerns trying to trace the illegal money Fisk was moving through Union Allied. In the end, it's through Karen's reading of Leland Owlsley's financial ledgers that they learn where Leland is hiding away Carl Hoffman, a corrupt detective that Fisk had earlier blackmailed into killing his own partner. Matt subsequently rescues Hoffman from an attempt on his life from cops working for Fisk, and gets him to testify.
-->'''Ben Urich:''' You don't understand how lucky you are. Count the angels on the head of a pin, and move on.
-->'''Karen Page:''' So they just shuffle some papers and all this disappears?
-->'''Ben Urich:''' Wouldn't be the first time.
-->'''Karen Page:''' Oh, don't bullshit me! A construction company is brick and mortar. Literally! All right, you cannot just shift cranes and trailers and office equipment like you can numbers on a page. There has to be a trail of everything that's being liquidated!
* In ''Series/JackRyan'', the title character begins his career with the CIA as an analyst looking for financial transactions that may be linked to terrorism, before his findings force him into the field.
* In ''Series/SEALTeam'' season 2, unknown terrorists attack Manila with [=IEDs=] in "Paradise Lost." In the next episode, "Payback," all investigations into identifying who the bombers are keep coming up empty until Mandy is able to identify the chemical makeup of the explosives and tracks a large shipment of ammonium nitrate to an isolated island. The perpetrators turn out to be the New Resistance Force, the terrorist branch of the [[DirtyCommunists Communist Party of the Philippines]], which is why U.S. intelligence missed out on them for a month since they were focusing their investigations on Islamic groups.

* ''TabletopGame/{{Chill}}'' had an Accounting skill available to characters. The text specifically said that it could be used to examine financial records to determine if embezzlement, money laundering or other kinds of financial crimes had occurred.

* An available core character skill of the TabletopGame/{{GUMSHOE}} System (used in games like ''TabletopGame/TheEsoterrorists'', ''TabletopGame/MutantCityBlues'', ''TabletopGame/TrailOfCthulhu'' and others). A given because the system is built to facilitate (and encourage) roleplaying detective work.
* The ''TabletopGame/D20Modern'' supplement ''d20 Cyberscape'' introduced a secondary abstract Wealth score called "Grey Wealth" to help explain characters getting around this trope in a future where every financial transaction leaves an electronic trail. Grey Wealth is an abstract representation of small valuables and other useful goods offered in barter.
* The ''TabletopGame/{{Eberron}}'' setting for ''TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons'' is built to recall periods like TheRoaringTwenties and TheGreatDepression more than MedievalStasis. The Research feat in the core setting book for 3.5 lets a character become a forensic accountant in all but name, as it gives them bonuses to ferreting out useful information from various records and the like; and discussions of the law or intelligence organizations in other books mention issues around money that they take an interest in as well. In short, it's the kind of setting where [[UsefulNotes/AlCapone Elf Capone]] would still be caught on tax evasion.
* ''TabletopGame/{{Gangbusters}}''. In the ''Magazine/{{Polyhedron}}'' magazine #15 adventure "The Vesper Investigation", the attic of Mr. Dane's house has old accounting ledgers. If a PlayerCharacter uses their Accounting skill while reading the ledgers, they can find out that Mr. Dane embezzled $240,000 from a Syndicate account. This is an important clue as to why Mr. Dane's house was ransacked and why he disappeared.

* In ''VideoGame/AlphaProtocol's'' backstory, Alan Parker went undercover as an accountant. His words to Mike Thorton on the subject provide the page quote.
** After he's [[spoiler: almost killed in Saudi Arabia]], Mike traces various financial transactions to find out what CorruptCorporateExecutive Leland and his company Halbech is up to, with transactions of weapon sales and transferring funds leading him to Taipei and Moscow (the third lead, Rome, is from another source).
* Near the end of the first ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfHeroesTrailsOfColdSteel'' game, [[StudentCouncilPresident Towa]] is revealed to have been secretly conducting a long-term audit of the [[MegaCorp Reinford Group's]] production numbers of refining raw iron ore into solid steel by comparing company sales figures to government reports on mine productivity. The numbers turn out to be way off because as it turns out, every shipment of iron ore that has come out of the mines for the past several years has had a small amount smuggled out and dumped onto the black market. The amount missing adds up to 100,000 [[FantasticMeasurementSystem torim]], or, enough to build [[OhCrap 2,000 tanks.]] [[spoiler: The smuggled metal was actually used to build the ''Pantagruel'', the 250-arge long [[CoolShip command airship]] of the Noble Alliance.]]
** In ''Cold Steel III'', Major Claire Rieveldt reveals that she has a seriously DarkAndTroubledPast when [[spoiler: she tells Rean the story of how she came to serve Chancellor Osborne. It all began after her parents and brother were killed in a car accident and her uncle's family took over the Rieveldt family business. While going through her deceased father's old belongings, she finds a stack of account books for the company and discovers that her uncle has been defrauding customers by selling cheap imported knockoffs of product at full price. This leads to a long chain of events that results in her tearing down her uncle's name, reputation, and business, and eventually his life when she gets him into trouble with many powerful nobles and leads to the death penalty for him. And her quest for vengeance was all started by Osborne's planting the idea in her head.]]
* In ''VideoGame/XenobladeChronicles2'', in Chapter 4 a Nopon intelligence agent named Niranira has been doing some "auditing" of the Argentum Trade Guild and has discovered a number of anomalies that point to Chairman Bana being [[CorruptCorporateExecutive crooked.]] In that same chapter, in order to track down who is controlling the renegade RobotGirl Lila, the team decides to start by investigating who in Mor Ardain could be ordering the very rare and specialized parts Lila needs to function.

[[folder:Webcomics]]

* In Lierature/{{Worm}}, both sides of the law have people with powers that easily lend themselves to this. It's one of the earliest ways of telling that there's a new Tinker in town; they are gear-dependent and the money and materials to build said equipment has to come and go somewhere.

* 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 Bruce Wayne, only for the first to [[IfOnlyYouKnew dismiss the idea as ridiculous]].

When you're trying to crack a big conspiracy, sometimes it can be hard to get people to open up to you because they're more scared of the conspirators than they are of you. At other times [[ScrewTheRulesIHaveConnections the conspirators are well-connected]] and have judicial protection for their secrets. But everything needs to be paid for somehow, and tracing the money can often get you the information you need.

*** 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.

** ''Masks of Nyarlathotep'' chapter 4 "Kenya". If the {{PC}}s make 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.

* Euphie's power in ''FanFic/AColdCalculus''. Upon her appointment as Viceroy of Area 11, she uproots the corruption in her administration and even uses it to figure out such things as: how the resistance cells procured Glasgow's, the existence of Clovis' secret project, the source of Refrain in the country and [[spoiler:the existence of the Geass Directorate.]]

* 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 ship is indeed where Kirito was taken, and it is actually an advanced vessel hosting a network of quantum computers for the purposes of military AI creation, being done in secret to avoid American surveillance.]]

** In ''Discworld/GoingPostal'', Moist von Lipwig [[FramingTheGuiltyParty manufactures a gold-plated excuse]] for Vetinari to do this to the villain. Which is, of course, what Vetinari wanted all along.

* One episode of ''Series/{{Castle}}'' had the team trying to find out who a slain plastic surgeon's last mystery patient was. Castle's solution was to get a warrant for the hospital's billing records to see who paid for the thing.

* This is also how they brought down [[UsefulNotes/TheMafia Joe Massino]], boss of the Bonanno crime family. Jack Stubing, an FBI agent assigned to investigate Massino's operations, was aware of the measures Massino had taken to avoid scrutiny compared to his contemporaries at the time. He therefore decided to go after Massino with a rear-guard action. He convinced his bosses to lend him a pair of forensic accountants normally used in fraud investigations, believing that they could easily pinpoint conspirators in the family's money laundering schemes. Stubing believed that the threat of long prison sentences would be sufficient to get anybody to turn informer, and thus make it easier to trace how the money flowed back to Massino. Ultimately, they managed to get a few of Massino's associates to squeal on him in 2003, including Salvatore Vitale, his underboss and brother-in-law, who was already incensed that Massino was plotting to kill him off.