Using Data Analytics in Financial Statement Fraud Detection and Prevention: A Systematic Review of Methods, Challenges, and Future Directions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reliable financial reporting is critical for maintaining market confidence and guiding stakeholders’ decision-making, yet traditional audit methods often fail to detect sophisticated fraud schemes that are hidden within large volumes of transactional data. This systematic literature review synthesizes 43 empirical and theoretical studies published between 2010 and 2024 that utilize data analytics techniques for the prevention and detection of fraud in financial statements. Following the PRISMA guidelines, we conducted a four-phase review—identification, screening, eligibility assessment, and inclusion—to ensure transparency and reproducibility. Our analysis categorizes techniques into supervised machine learning classifiers (e.g., decision trees and neural networks), statistical anomaly detection methods, network-based analyses, and real-time monitoring frameworks. We evaluate each approach’s comparative effectiveness, highlight persistent challenges such as data imbalance, model interpretability, and governance constraints, and also trace evolving methodological trends over time. The review reveals that integrating predictive analytics and continuous monitoring into accounting information systems can transform audits from reactive investigations into proactive fraud prevention mechanisms. We conclude by proposing a future research agenda focusing on developing explainable AI models for audit applications, establishing robust data governance frameworks to support automated monitoring, and conducting longitudinal field studies to assess the real-world impact of analytics-driven controls.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.062 | 0.209 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.020 | 0.020 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".