Forensic Services - An Innovation on the Auditing Market?

Abstract

Over the past 10 years large German auditing companies have enriched their service portfolios by offering forensic services. However, since the individual services and methods employed are not new by themselves, one may question, whether and where forensic services offer an improvement for the accounting firm and/or the client. In this paper we show how the forensic-specific bundling of well-known and established services in the service portfolio of auditing firms creates improvements both for audit firms and the customers of forensic services due to the specific competence of the auditor compared to a "normal" consultant.