POLICY IMPLEMENTATION OF FORENSIC ACCOUNTING IN NIGERIA’S REVENUE LEAKAGE: A LITERATURE REVIEW

Abstract

Accounting system has remained the bedrock in the management of financial activities. Over the years the traditional accounting system and accountants have dominated the human accounting activities. In modern days accounting systems and its attention have shifted to the deployment and use of technological driven accounting skills known as ‘forensic accounting’ and the use of forensic accountants especially in the areas of financial crime detection, control and reporting both for organizational financial control and judicial uses. The objective of this paper is to evaluate the policy implementation of forensic accounting in Nigeria from the standpoint of government revenue leakages. Fraud triangle theory forms the theoretical framework of this paper. Methodologically, the paper solely relied on empirical literature for data collection, content and documentary analysis. The finding of the paper shows that government revenue leakages come due to poor or unpriced transactions, operational inefficiencies, incorrect pricing of goods and services, missing transactions. It is further found that income denial activities happen during onboarding, monitoring, prospecting, processing of transactions, invoicing and recovering, and closure of transaction with customers and clients. One of the recommendations of the paper is that government must make it compulsory the application and deployment of forensic accounting and forensic accountants in all the ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs). The paper concludes that application of forensic accounting and forensic accountants in determining, collection and recovering of government revenues would help to detect, control and deal effectively the problem of these leakages.