This fall, DePaul University’s School of Accountancy and Management Information Systems in Chicago will offer a new graduate course that will teach auditing students a skill that is suddenly in great demand – how to detect and investigate financial fraud.

“Accounting 798: Detecting & Investigating Financial Fraud” will cover forensic accounting subjects that include data mining to identify hidden financial fraud, techniques for interviewing suspect employees and the legal aspects of financial investigations. The 10-week evening course, which begins Sept. 16, quickly filled to a capacity of 30 students during registration.

“With all the fraud cases you read about in the Wall Street Journal, it’s clear that financial fraud detection and investigation is much more important these days,” said Ray Whittington, director of the accountancy school. “For students in the auditing field, this will be a valuable course taught by people with extensive experience in fraud investigation.”

In keeping with the DePaul business school’s reputation for hiring faculty members with real world experience, the course will be taught by three partners from PricewaterhouseCoopersInvestigations and Forensic Services (PwC). The Chicago division of the professional services firm that conducts about 90 investigations internationally each year for firms that suspect employees of financial statement fraud, embezzlement, kick-back and sham vendor schemes, and other fraudulent activities. Teaching the class will be Thomas W. Golden, founder of the Midwest practice for PwC, Mona M. Clayton, a 10-year veteran of the investigative unit, and Michael T. Dyer, a PwC partner who directed the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s white-collar crime investigations unit in Chicago for five years.

Golden, a frequent conference speaker and expert witness on financial fraud, said that only a handful of accountancy schools are teaching auditing students how to identify financial wrongdoing, but he believes this must change. Although auditors are not required to detect financial fraud under generally accepted auditing standards, Golden said that the recent debacles involving Enron, WorldCom and other corporations have expanded the “expectation gap” between what the public expects of auditors and what they are required to do.

“The public believes auditors have these skills, but they don’t,” he said. “If auditors aren’t able to detect material fraud, the audit opinion may become of diminished value. Auditors are the smartest, external financial people involved in providing assurance to the capital markets that the true financial picture of a public corporation—as represented by its management—is reasonably accurate. They are on the front line and are the investor’s best defense for detecting financial fraud, if it exists. We need to train them for this role.”

Part of DePaul’s Kellstadt Graduate School of Business, the School of Accountancy and Management Information Systems enrolls approximately 600 students and is among the largest, most innovative and well-known professional schools in the nation. The school’s full-time faculty holds virtually every degree and credential relevant to the accountancy field, includes nationally and internationally known authors, scholars and researchers, and considers teaching its chief mission.