Asian Financial Statement Analysis: Detecting Financial Irregularities

GENESIS OF THIS BOOK

The idea for this book first came from the chairman of one of the largest and most iconic stock exchanges in the world. She appealed to my strong passion to uplift the Asian corporate governance standard and urged me to write a book on forensic accounting.

My first humbling reminder of why I need to develop a systematic way to intelligently read quantitative (and qualitative) data in the investments I made came when I experienced my first credit default during the Asian crisis in 1998. My skill-set further improved when I worked for U.S. authorities on a number of fraud cases in 2001 to 2002, the “go-go” era when WorldCom and Enron dominated headlines. Since then, I have been given the privilege of doing pro-bono advisory work on forensic accounting cases for regulators in a number of countries.

With the book idea in mind, I immediately approached former accounting professor Tom Robinson to collaborate on this book. As a Managing Director at the CFA Institute, Tom is a natural partner. He has done seminars on accounting fraud with me, and his knowledge base in this topic is extensive. Tom readily agreed, as both of us are determined to do our small part in improving corporate governance standards and analysis in Asia. We hope the readers will be able to benefit from both theoretical and practical application of accounting principles.

Best Regards,Chin Hwee Tan, CFA, CPA