Some crime busters depend on fingerprints.
Now one scholar in Nova Scotia has taken cooperation between law enforcement and science a step further. He is using an arcane mathematical law to help governments and companies catch financial frauds. Mark Negrini, an assistant professor of accounting at St. Mary's University in Halifax, is trapping tax cheats, check forgers and embezzlers with an obscure theory known as Benford's Law. Formulated by physicist Frank Benford in 1938, the law lays out the statistical frequency with which the numbers 1 through 9 appear in any set of random numbers. Mr. Negrini applies the law to the numbers on suspicious checks or tax returns.