Building a Case: Gathering and Documenting Evidence
Frederic R. Miller, David L. Marston · 2012
This chapter highlights the point that gathering, documenting and retaining evidence are crucial steps in any investigation and critical to forensic accounting investigations. In such investigations, several types of evidence are normally relevant and most of them are documentary in nature. Before gathering any evidence, the forensic accounting investigator should consider with the counsel and the client the level of detailed record keeping necessary to establish the chain of custody over the evidence. Evidence-gathering plan should begin broadly. Even though some of the allegations could be unfounded or overblown by disgruntled employees, it may be unwise to ignore them. Original documents should be marked as evidence and filed separately. Gathering evidence and keeping proper control of it from the time it was first collected until its ultimate use in legal proceedings or other forms of reporting are highly significant aspects of a properly conducted forensic accounting investigation.