During these stressed governmental economic times, a new term is being used: forensic audit . Have you heard it? What do you understand it to mean?

From Eric Zorn's article linked to above there is little clarity about what the term means, and some are suggesting taking it out of our vocabularly:

quote:

Ferguson's predecessor, David Hoffman (who endorsed Emanuel during the mayoral campaign), said it would be best to "delete the term 'forensic audit' " from the conversation as it seems to sow confusion. But he stressed that any in-depth look at city finances would inevitably go back several years.

Thoughts?

I've never really given it any thought and it's possible that it does have some specific meaning I am unaware of, but it's always seemed to me to simple mean "very thorough" audit and as an audit by nature should be thorough, it seems like a redundant formation and hence is probably just being used for emphasis.

I'm probably completely wrong.

Any accountants or auditors on the board?

I think it's funny that Emanuel called it a "forensics" audit, instead of a "forensic" audit. He must have been thinking about forensics courses.

Well, by that explanation, they are using it wrong then. It seems to be a legal process, rather than a method of evaluating the finances of government, which is how it was used.

The CIS franchise of TV shows regularly uses forensic evidence in the plots. In this case they use forensic police medicine, which is medical knowledge applied to evidence in a court of law. It is essentially a specialist branch of medicine. It is often truncated to just forensics and people have started applying the word to other things besides medical evidence, outside the courts. In essence, as Bob says, it's used to mean "very thorough".