Catch me, if you can?

Background

You have recently been hired by the U.S. internal revenue service (IRS) to catch corporate cheaters. You have been given three companies to investigate. You will need to decide if the IRS should build a legal case to investigate the institution for fraud.

• Sino Forest Corporation: You have the values from the financial statement numbers of Sino Forest Corporation’s 2010 Report.
• Government Entity: A dataset containing the card transactions for a government entity - 2010.
• General Motors: The amounts paid to vendors for the 90 days preceding General Motor’s 2009 liquidation.

Our challenge

You will be responsible to report as much evidence as you can with the data provided for each institution above. The government entity has more available data than the other two which will require you to dig deeper to find additional clues.

You can find varied data sources available for your use on the data page in Canvas. You will need to use more than one of the data sets provided but you are not expected to use them all,

Deliverables

• A 8-12 slide presentation to your IRS managers on the case against each entity.
• At least one slide that shows the statistical test results from the analysis you performed.
• At least one slide per institution that visualizes their first digit distribution compared to Benford’s law.
• At least one slide for one of the institutions that compares the last digit distribution to what would be expected.
• Multiple visualizations of the Government Entity data to find other interesting insights.

Which company looks like they could be cheating?

What additional data do we have on the cheating companies?

• What data do we have on each company?
• What ideas do you have for further investigation?
• Do you have any new data wrangling you would like us to do?