Forensic Accounting is not only a financial discipline, but one that requires the ability to present extremely well. This is because they are often required to assist in legal disputes that result in their opinions being sought during a trial. They are the only party in a hearing or trial that is allowed to give opinion evidence - all others must speak facts.

Often called expert witnesses, a forensic expert will usually work in two different areas. This is the financial investigation work preceding a trial and the actual hearing in court. The Expert Accountant is also an experienced fraud investigator.

Using both accountancy knowledge and investigative skills, they will drill down into the financial and business aspects of any case that they are presented with. This could be in a number of different areas:

1. A divorce where one side has attempted to hide marital assets often requires a tracing or valuation exercise. The Forensic Accountant might be asked to trace assets that a husband has concealed or value a family business so that both parties can take their proper share.

2. A personal injury could involve the Forensic Accountant calculating how much a victim would have earned but for an accident - for the purposes of quantifying compensation payable by an insurance company.

3. One party might have delivered the wrong goods and the other might have suffered losses of profits that need to be quantified.

4. A company might wish to sack an employee who has been defrauding their business - and need an expert accountant to calculate the size of the losses and to trace where they have disappeared to.

5. In a criminal fraud trial the prosecution might want the Forensic Accountant to explain to the court how the fraudster was able to steal the money - or on the other hand the criminal might want to attempt to mitigate his own position by undermining the charges against him!

For many people, the thought of pages and pages of bank statements and other financial information is very daunting. Sometimes a fraud will involve money moving between hundreds of bank accounts and many hundreds of thousands of transactions. It is the Forensic Accountant's job to distil this information to a simple form, such as a succinct table or a few lines of explanation within a report.

To simplify accounting information in this way it would be very easy for a Forensic Accountant to hoodwink the court, which is the reason why both sides will usually employ their own experts. However, the best expert witnesses are fully accredited by a number of august bodies, have years of unblemished experience behind them and are usually recommended highly by respected parties.

To get the best out of such an expert it is a good idea to bring them in at the outset of any financial dispute. Sometimes it is possible to prevent one or both sides from barking up the wrong tree and expending substantial costs in doing so.

Once the matter reaches the formal jurisdiction of the court, the Forensic Accountant's other skills will be called into play. Sometimes the expert witness will be interrogated by the opposition barister to find any flaws in their opinion. Sometimes where this is not possible the barrister will seek to undermine the expert's credibility by forceful questioning. Not only must the expert be able to respond in a way that assists the court to understand the complex issues, they must also withstand the barrage of sometimes unreasonable questions that are intended to weaken and even intimidate the expert.