Any Forensic Accountants in the building?

[BRISTOL86]

In a bit of a job rut at the moment and feel like my skills are not being utilised to the extent they could be.

I'm an ACCA qualified accountant working in a management accounting/business partnering role with coming up to 4 years PQE but was in a similar role for 5 years prior whilst qualifying AAT and ACCA.

Frankly I'm completely fed up of a 'month end' role now after nearly ten years of it, and the cycle of having almost nothing to do for 3 weeks and then stupidly busy for 1.

Forensic accounting is an area that I've always been interested in and I feel like my skill set would be a good fit for that.

Just looking to hear from some others in similar roles for some insight into the field and potential employers. I can't stand dealing with recruitment agents at the best of times so I'm looking to do as much independent research as I can until such point!

Cheers

[Shirt587]

How much audit experience have you got? As in, doing audit/assurance work rather than being audited.

I somehow suspect that your skill set is not a good fit for what forensic teams are looking for. It's a pretty niche field, with a significant focus on investigation and proof - evidence collection, rather than reconciliations. And because it's a 'sexy' area, they tend to attract lots of interested people to recruit from, who they can then work ridiculously hard for not significantly large amounts of money. You could probably get a job there, but it would likely be a pretty junior one.

My 0.02 - I am not a forensic accountant, but have spent a couple of years having lunch with one..

[Countdown]

It's an adjunct of Audit/Assurance work. I've used Mazars and Grant Thornton in the past. The Big 4 will also have people who specialise in this. Unless you've trained in Audit I think it might be tough to simply "move across".

[BRISTOL86]

Shirt587 said:

How much audit experience have you got? As in, doing audit/assurance work rather than being audited.

I somehow suspect that your skill set is not a good fit for what forensic teams are looking for. It's a pretty niche field, with a significant focus on investigation and proof - evidence collection, rather than reconciliations. And because it's a 'sexy' area, they tend to attract lots of interested people to recruit from, who they can then work ridiculously hard for not significantly large amounts of money. You could probably get a job there, but it would likely be a pretty junior one.

My 0.02 - I am not a forensic accountant, but have spent a couple of years having lunch with one..

Thanks for that. Sadly pretty much reinforced my concern that without a practice/audit background it would be a non starter. When I referred to my skills I was coming at it from being very methodical/analytical in my approach rather than actual experience in an audit/assurance role.

[Steve Campbell]

What kind of business are you in ? Do they have management or quality internal audits that you could support / get trained for as CPD and build the audit skills via the day job for a year or 2 ?

[BRISTOL86]

Steve Campbell said:

What kind of business are you in ? Do they have management or quality internal audits that you could support / get trained for as CPD and build the audit skills via the day job for a year or 2 ?

I'm in the energy sector, we have an internal audit department but I will have limited ability to get involved in that here.

[Ganglandboss]

Have you looked at loss adjusting firms? We have a few at the firm I work for.