Economics, Business and Management: Recent Advances Vol. 3

Forensic accounting has developed from a specialised form of investigative accounting into a heterogeneous field spanning fraud examination, dispute advisory, expert evidence, digital investigation and technology-enabled risk analysis. This expansion has increased its practical relevance but has also produced persistent ambiguity about professional boundaries, theoretical foundations and standards of proof. This critical narrative review maps the field’s evolution and evaluates the evidence supporting its principal methods, competencies and technological directions. Literature published from 1 January 1990 to 2 June 2026 was sought through accessible scholarly indexes, repositories and targeted citation searching, with selected earlier sources retained for historical and theoretical context. The synthesis shows that forensic accounting is best understood as an engagement-oriented practice defined by investigative purpose and evidential accountability rather than by any single technique. Its strongest contribution lies in integrating accounting reconstruction, corroborative inquiry and legally intelligible communication. Fraud theories remain useful for structuring hypotheses but are weak as stand-alone predictive models, particularly where collusion, organisational incentives and adaptive concealment dominate. Statistical indicators, text analysis and machine-learning models can improve triage and pattern recognition, yet most studies rely on retrospective, jurisdiction-specific and imperfectly labelled datasets. Such tools therefore support investigation; they do not independently establish intent, attribution or admissible proof. Blockchain and artificial intelligence extend traceability and analytical scale but also intensify risks involving off-chain data quality, opacity, privacy, model drift, adversarial manipulation and automation bias. Education and professional governance have not consistently kept pace with these changes. The future of the field depends less on adopting increasingly complex tools than on validating them prospectively, documenting provenance, integrating human judgement, and aligning analytical outputs with legal and ethical standards. A more mature forensic accounting discipline will require common competency frameworks, stronger comparative research, transparent evaluation benchmarks and explicit separation between risk signals and evidential conclusions.