When Ron Forster conducts interviews, he watches his subjects as much as he listens to them. He monitors their eyes. He watches their arms. He notes where they place their hands.
Even a seemingly innocuous gesture -- an interviewee moving his hand away from his face right before answering a sensitive question -- could be a sign that a subject is lying.
And you thought accounting was boring.
Mr. Forster is a forensic accountant -- a growing subset of the accounting field focusing on uncovering financial fraud.
And while forensic accountants do their share of number crunching and computer analysis, they also do work that resembles television crime show investigations more than it does the world of the proverbial green eyeshade.
"We look at documents, we look at e-mails, we do interviews," said Mr. Forster, a partner with KPMG in Philadelphia who leads the firm's mid-Atlantic forensic accounting practice. "Between all of that, you come to discover what facts make sense."
As the economy plummets, forensic accounting is one field that is expected to grow.
Forensic accounting is now the most popular specialty in Duquesne University's master of accountancy program. And the University of Pittsburgh plans to add a class in forensic accounting when it starts up its own master's program this fall.
When the going gets tough, it seems, financial fraud gets going.
"When the economy starts to tank, a couple things happen," said Marc Brdar, a forensic accountant with the Downtown firm Schneider Downs. "First of all, people in positions of trust are more likely to rationalize going over that line and No. 2, during a declining economy, fraud activity more often comes to light. Prosperity typically can hide a multitude of sins."
Mr. Brdar got into forensic accounting nine years ago after working as a controller of a company and investigating a manager who was engaging in fraud.
"I just really got a charge going after him, especially through the lies and deceit," he said.
The field has grown in recent years, with a general awareness of financial fraud jump-started by mammoth accounting scandals at Enron and WorldCom and changing auditing standards that emphasized fraud detection.
"We really have a more heightened sense of accountability now than we did 10 years ago, a greater sense that fraud can occur," said Bob Kollar, director of the master of accountancy and taxation programs at Duquesne University's Palumbo-Duquesne School of Business.
That same awareness has drawn students to the field.
"They want to be fraud fighters," he said. "It's interesting to follow the trail, detect what's happened and help convict someone. You have to peel back all the layers of the onion."
In the last five years, the number of fraud examiners certified by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners has jumped 64 percent, from 15,148 to 24,797.
The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants started issuing certifications in Financial Forensics in June 2008, and already has 2,900 members with the CFF credential.
Salaries for forensic accountants can start around $50,000, and more experienced people can earn into six figures.
Financial fraud is more likely to be detected through whistleblowers or other tipsters than through routine audits, according to the institute.
While many forensic accountants are called in at that point to investigate potential fraud, others work with businesses on preventive strategies to deter employees from committing fraud or detect it in its earliest stages.
And though instances of fraud most often reported in the media are those on the million- or billion-dollar level of Bernard Madoff or Enron, fraud is statistically more common at smaller companies, said Valerie Williams, who teaches forensic accounting classes at Duquesne.
In her classes, Ms. Williams teaches techniques for identifying someone likely to commit fraud (someone with financial difficulties at home, for example) and puts her students through mock interviews with an employee (played by her) who is stealing money from a dry cleaning company. In four years of doing the exercise with 80 students, only four have interviewed her well enough to leave her no option but to confess.
Though the University of Pittsburgh hasn't had a standalone forensic accounting class, it's a topic of perennial interest to students, said Vicky Hoffman, an associate professor who will teach forensic accounting there this fall.
"They think it's 'CSI' or something," she said. "They find out it's still accounting, but it has a Sherlock Holmes aspect about it."
Just the word "forensic" now draws people to the field, given its association with popular television, said Mr. Forster. That said, he isn't expecting "CSI: Pittsburgh Accountants" anytime soon.
"Rarely are the bean counters highlighted," he joked.
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