Maris Sekar - Machine Learning for Auditors: Automating Fraud Investigations Through Artificial Intelligence

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Have you ever pondered over missing a fraudulent transaction? What if there was a smart person out there who found a way to hide a single financial transaction among millions of other transactions? Can you really find a needle in a haystack? These thoughts echoed within me while I was trying to come up with an audit plan to identify transactions that looked suspicious.

Internal auditors are the last line of defense when it comes to protecting an organizations confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information assets. Auditors are often portrayed as professionals verifying if processes, procedures, and controls are in place to mitigate the business risks. What if auditors can also bring in additional value to the organization as a trusted advisor?

The complexity and size of organizational information assets are ever increasing. The chance of finding fraudulent transactions using traditional audit methods is small and decreases over time. Scalable and sustainable solutions need to be incorporated by the internal audit department in order to make a significant advance in the fight against the organizational threat actors.

With the help of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science, the challenges faced by traditional audit methods can be overcome. This book provides a systematic way to apply artificial intelligence to the field of internal audit. It is especially useful for those with domain expertise in the field of auditing, but lack the technical expertise required for artificial intelligence.

The book is structured to introduce the reader to internal auditors evolved role as trusted advisors. The current challenges and solutions faced by the internal audit team are illustrated. This is followed by a primer to machine learning and data science concepts. Data visualization and storytelling are then covered in a great level of detail to support the sharing of audit results. Finally, practical applications of the artificial intelligence concepts are described and demonstrated in terms of recipes. Each recipe is accompanied with working code examples that can be easily incorporated into audits.

I hope you have as much fun reading it and applying it in your practice, as I had in writing the book.