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Fraud is a word to strike fear into the hearts of any investor, who tend to take a company’s financial figures at face value. But time after time they find themselves burnt when overly aggressive or even fraudulent accounting leads to calamity.
欺诈是一个所有投资者都害怕的词——他们往往完全相信一个公司的财务数据。但一次又一次，他们发现自己在过于激进乃至欺诈性会计手法导致灾难的时候蒙受了损失。
Enron is the classic case of a seemingly rock-solid corporate titan that was in reality a fragile edifice of dodgy numbers and accounting subterfuge. More recently, Valeant, the Canadian pharma group, has lost nearly $80bn of its value over accounting concerns.
安然(Enron)就是一个典型案例：一个表面看上去坚如磐石的庞大企业，实际上是用虚假数据和假账堆砌起来的脆弱大厦。最近，加拿大制药集团Valeant因外界对其会计手法的担忧而损失了近800亿美元的市值。
The company recently said that its internal accounting review had found nothing that would force it to restate its earnings, helping its shares regain their footing, but many big-name investors are still nursing huge losses.
Valeant最近表示，经过内部会计审核，该公司不必重报利润数据，这帮助其股价重新站稳了脚跟，但许多知名投资者仍然蒙受巨大损失。
Can mining reams of data about companies help investors detect issues early? Deutsche Bank’s financial scientists believe so, and have developed a model that scans for potential problems.
挖掘公司的海量数据可以帮助投资者及早发现问题吗？德意志银行(Deutsche Bank)的金融科学家们相信可以，并开发出了一个查找潜在问题的模型。
It mines the Securities and Exchange Commission’s database of companies censured for accounting problems — highlighting how banks, trading firms and regulators are increasingly turning to novel technological solutions to uncover market abuses.
这个模型挖掘美国证交会(SEC)的数据库，该数据库包含被指责存在会计问题的公司的数据。德意志银行的这一举动突显出，银行、交易公司和监管机构都越来越多地求助于新技术解决方案来发现市场滥用行为。
“Accounting numbers are like volcanoes. When they lie dormant, people forget how dangerous they can be,” Deutsche Bank said in a recent note.
德意志银行在最近发布的一份报告中表示：“会计数据就像是火山。当它们休眠的时候，人们忘记了它们可以多么危险。”
The German bank’s model used “Benford’s Law” to identify possible irregularities. In 1938, physicist Frank Benford noticed that in a random selection of numbers digit 1 tends to appear more often at the beginning of a number than 2, and 2 more often than 3.
德意志银行的模型使用了“本福德定律”来查找可能的不合规行为。1938年，物理学家弗兰克•本福德(Frank Benford)注意到，随机选择一些数字时，首位数为1的数字往往比首位数为2的数字更常见，首位数为2的数字比首位数为3的数字更常见。
This curious law is used to analyse everything from weather patterns to election fraud.
这种奇特法则被用来分析一切事物——从天气模式到选举欺诈。
“The natural extension of this hypothesis,” Deutsche Bank’s Javed Jussa wrote, “is that companies that do not conform to Benford’s law may exhibit some sort of accounting irregularity.”
德意志银行的贾韦德•尤萨(Javed Jussa)写道：“从这种假设可以自然地推导出，不符合本福德法则的公司可能从事了某种会计不合规行为。”
Deutsche Bank’s quantitative analysts are not the only ones looking to harness modern technology and data mining to unearth potential problems.
并非只有德意志银行的定量分析师在寻求利用现代技术和数据挖掘来揭示潜在问题。
Regulators are also looking to capitalise on recent advances in computing and “machine-learning” algorithms to autonomously scan financial markets and company reports for signs of fraud or abuse.
监管机构也在寻求利用计算和“机器学习”算法上最近的进展来自动扫描金融市场和公司财报，以寻找欺诈或市场滥用行为的蛛丝马迹。
This is the future of fraud detection, says Steven Blum, a managing director at Control Risks’s compliance and forensic accounting division. “It’s a tool, but an increasingly powerful tool. And the more data you get into the mix the more powerful it becomes.”
化险咨询(Control Risks)合规和法务会计部门的董事总经理史蒂文•布卢姆(Steven Blum)表示，这是欺诈侦查的未来。“它是一个工具，但这种工具越来越强大。你把越多数据输入进去，它就越强大。”
For example, a few years ago the SEC rolled out what has been dubbed its “Robocop”, a computer program more formally called the “Accounting Quality Model”.
例如，美国证交会几年前推出了一个绰号为“机械战警”(Robocop)的计算机程序，它的正式名称是“会计质量模型”。
This uses the regulator’s treasure trove of financial data to detect patterns in corporate earnings reports that might hint at strange behaviour — whether just aggressive accounting practices or outright deceit.
该程序使用证交会的金融数据库来发现企业利润报告中的模式，从中发现可能隐含的古怪行为——无论是激进的会计手法还是赤裸裸的欺诈。
The details on the SEC’s Robocop are sparse, but Mr Jussa found several important indicators that could hint at potential accounting mishaps.
关于美国证交会“机械战警”的具体情况，人们知之甚少，但尤萨发现了多个可能暗示着潜在会计问题的重要指标。
Some are technical market factors. Sizeable bets against a company — as measured by the “short interest” — are a classic sign that some hedge fund managers smell something fishy. Unusually high trading volumes and prices far away from their one-year lows are also warning signs.
一些指标是技术性的市场因素。对一家公司的大规模做空（以“卖空数量”衡量）是一些对冲基金公司发现疑点的典型迹象。异常高的交易量和远高于一年低点的价格也是值得警惕的迹象。
But there are more fundamental warning signs, such as the reported cash flow that a company’s assets throw off, the expected dividend yield and the turnover of the company’s assets.
但还有更为基本的预警信号，比如公司财报中资产产生的现金流、预计股息收益以及资产周转率。
The most common problem is the misstatement of revenues, for example aggressively booking in orders as actual sales — something some tech companies have a tendency to do — or recording sales in one period when the goods are actually shipped in the next quarter. Another is accounting for some costs as assets.
最普遍的问题是虚报收入，比如将订单记为实际销售的激进做法——某些科技公司倾向于这么做——或者将下一季度才真正发货的商品记入本期销售。另一个问题是将一些费用记为资产。
Early identification of potential problems can help investors avoid some dud bets. Deutsche Bank ran its accounting fraud model against 30 years of financial data, and found that a portfolio of companies it found as “potentially vulnerable to accounting irregularities” underperformed the broader stock market by a third.
及早发现潜在问题可以帮助投资者避免一些无用押注。德意志银行用其会计欺诈模型处理了30年的金融数据，结果发现，模型认定“可能存在会计不合规风险”的那些公司的股价表现比大盘低三分之一。
Mr Blum points out that “big data” and evermore sophisticated algorithms will become increasingly common among a variety of organisations in the finance industry.
布卢姆指出，“大数据”以及越来越先进的算法将在金融行业中的众多机构中变得越来越普遍。
Even some repentant sinners are now using technology to detect market abuses. After being censured and fined for “spoofing” — submitting a blizzard of orders and cancellations only to move the price of a security — in 2010, trading outfit Trillium developed a system to spot and prevent spoofing internally, which it is now marketing to other firms.
就连一些犯过错但痛改前非的机构，现在也在使用技术来发现市场滥用行为。在2010年因“幌骗”（spoofing，一种市场操纵手法，先提交大量订单然后取消，目的只是为了改变证券价格）而遭受谴责和罚款之后，Trillium开发了一套系统，在内部发现并阻止“幌骗”。现在Trillium正向其他公司推销这套系统。
“The controls we built have turned out to be a next-generation solution to spoofing,” says Michael Friedman, Trillium’s general counsel.
Trillium的总法律顾问迈克尔•弗里德曼(Michael Friedman)表示：“事实证明，我们建立的控制措施是杜绝‘幌骗’的下一代方案。”
The “Surveyor” program autonomously scans for the market order book for potential manipulation, such as spoofing, insider trading, two-sided trading — where a company pushes a stock around by trading with two separate accounts, either intentionally or by accident — and “wash trades”, the simultaneous selling and buying of a stock through different brokers.
“监督员”(Surveyor)程序自动扫描市场订单簿，以寻找潜在的操纵行为，比如“幌骗”、内幕交易、两面交易（指一家公司通过两个独立账户交易来操纵股票，无论是有意还是无意）以及“虚买虚卖”（wash trades，指通过不同经纪商同时买进和卖出一支股票）。
In other words, technological advances and increasingly complex markets may make an investor or regulator’s job harder and more complex, but may also offer some potentially powerful solutions to keeping financial markets clean.
换言之，技术进步和日益复杂的市场可能让投资者或者监管机构的工作变得更加艰难和复杂，但可能也提供了一些潜力巨大的解决方案来保持金融市场的纯净。
