회계부정 탐지를 위한 벤포드 법칙을 이용한 지방자치단체의 회계투명성 검증에 관한 연구: 감사원 감사결과와의 비교를 중심으로

Local governments' budgets represent a significant portion of Korea's total budget, which is 40 percent of the total budget. However, due to limited resources and lack of expertise of local councilors, substantial monitoring, and control of 243 local governments have been limited. Accounting frauds in local governments are reported through the media, it is expected that there are many more unknown crimes than those revealed due to the nature of financial crimes. Thus, this study analyzes accounting data of 243 local governments across the country for five years using Benford’s Law to effectively analyze large accounting data sets and detect irregularities. We compare the results from Benford’s Law with the audit results of the Board of Audit and Inspection to measure the utility of using the Benford Law to verify the accounting transparency of local governments. We find that the audit results of the Board of Audit and Inspection are in compliance with the Benford Law, which is statistically related. Also, we find that Benford's statistics of local governments that have illegalities in audit results are significantly greater than those not to have.