Breaking the (Benford) Law

2007/07/18 by Wendy K Tam Cho, Wendy K. Tam Cho, Brian J Gaines +1 · 207 citations
Mathematics · #Actuarial science #Benford's law #Benford’s Law and Fraud Detection #Computer science #Data science #Econometrics #Economics #Language change #Linguistics #Mathematics #Statistics

paper · doi:10.1198/000313007x223496

published in The American Statistician 61(3), 218-223 (Taylor & Francis)

openalex publication_date 2007/07/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29

Abstract

Benford's law is seeing increasing use as a diagnostic tool for isolating pockets of large datasets with irregularities that deserve closer inspection. Popular and academic accounts of campaign finance are rife with tales of corruption, but the complete dataset of transactions for federal campaigns is enormous. Performing a systematic sweep is extremely arduous; hence, these data are a natural candidate for initial screening by comparison to Benford's distributions.

Citations

• On the Peculiar Distribution of the U.S. Stock Indexes' Digits
• Note on the Frequency of Use of the Different Digits in Natural Numbers

Cited by

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• Election Fraud: A Latent Class Framework for Digit-Based Tests
• Misreporting in financial statements in a centrally planned economy: The case of Czechoslovak state-owned enterprises in late socialism
• Testing Case Number of Coronavirus Disease 2019 in China with Newcomb-Benford Law
• Quantitative Partition Models and Benford's Law
• BeyondBenford: An R Package to Determine Which of Benford's or BDS's Distributions is the Most Relevant
• Authoritarian Governments Appear to Manipulate COVID Data
• Applying Benford’s law to COVID-19 data: the case of the European Union
• Benford’s law predicted digit distribution of aggregated income taxes: the surprising conformity of Italian cities and regions
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• Statistical analysis of Brazilian electoral campaigns via Benford’s law
• Benford's Law Applies to Online Social Networks. [europepmc]
• Using the Newcomb-Benford law to study the association between a country's COVID-19 reporting accuracy and its development. [europepmc]
• Does the bankrupt cheat? Impact of accounting manipulations on the effectiveness of a bankruptcy prediction. [europepmc]
• Application of citizen science with the nationwide bird census. [europepmc]
• Newcomb-Benford number law and ecological processes. [europepmc]
• Authoritarian Governments Appear to Manipulate COVID Data [europepmc]
• Regime type and Data Manipulation: Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic [europepmc]

Related

• A Widespread Error in the Use of Benford's Law to Detect Election and Other Fraud
• Double-Crossing Benford's Law
• Benford’s Law and Fraud Detection: Facts and Legends
• Robust inference under Benford's law
• Benford's Law: Textbook Exercises and Multiple-choice Testbanks