Identification of fraudulent financial statements through a multi‐label classification approach

Summary Although the financial audit controls in companies have advanced over the years, the number of corporate fraud instances is growing, thus raising the need for investigating the factors that can be used as early warning signals and developing effective systems for identifying financial fraud. In this paper, financial statements from 133 Greek companies listed in the Athens Stock Exchange over the period 2014 to 2019 are investigated, based on the fraud diamond theory. Financial data and corporate governance variables are used as inputs to data mining techniques to develop models that can identify patterns of irregularities in a company's financial reports. To this end, popular machine learning classification algorithms are employed in a novel multi‐label classification setting that not only identifies fraudulent cases but also considers the nature of the auditors' comments. The results indicate that the proposed multi‐label approach provides enhanced results compared to binary classification algorithms, avoiding inconsistent outputs with respect to the existence of different forms of manipulation of financial statements.