Falsifying financial statements involves the manipulation of financial accounts by overstating assets, sales and profit, or understating liabilities, expenses or losses. This paper explores the effectiveness of an innovative classification methodology in detecting firms that issue falsified financial statements (FFS) and the identification of the factors associated to FFS. The methodology is based on the concepts of multicriteria decision aid (MCDA) and the application of the UTADIS classification method (UTilités Additives DIScriminantes). A sample of 76 Greek firms (38 with FFS and 38 non-FFS) described over ten financial ratios is used for detecting factors associated with FFS. A jackknife procedure approach is employed for model validation and comparison with multivariate statistical techniques, namely discriminant and logit analysis. The results indicate that the proposed MCDA methodology outperforms traditional statistical techniques which are widely used for FFS detection purposes. Furthermore, the results indicate that the investigation of financial information can be helpful towards the identification of FFS and highlight the importance of financial ratios such as the total debt to total assets ratio, the inventories to sales ratio, the net profit to sales ratio and the sales to total assets ratio.
We present a new approach to evaluation of bankruptcy risk of firms based on the rough set theory. The concept of a rough set appeared to be an effective tool for the analysis of information systems representing knowledge gained by experience. The financial information system describes a set of objects (firms) by a set of multi-valued attributes (financial ratios and qualitative variables), called condition attributes. The firms are classified into groups of risk subject to an expert's opinion, called decision attribute. A natural problem of knowledge analysis consists then in discovering relationships, in terms of decision rules, between description of firms by condition attributes and particular decisions. The rough set approach enables one to discover minimal subsets of condition attributes ensuring an acceptable quality of classification of the firms analysed and to derive decision rules from the financial information system which can be used to support decisions about financing new firms. Using the rough set approach one analyses only facts hidden in data, it does not need any additional information about data and does not correct inconsistencies manifested in data; instead, rules produced are categorized into certain and possible. A real problem of the evaluation of bankruptcy risk by a Greek industrial development bank is studied using the rough set approach.
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