OUR STORY
Larry Kanter formed Kanter Financial Forensics, LLC in 2011 but our story dates back to years of client service experiences. Kanter’s initial public accounting experience led to his being admitted to the partnership of Coopers & Lybrand in 1996. Kanter credits his rise to the partnership to being one of the first practitioners (in what was then the “Big Six”) to understand the importance of technology in the investigation of legal disputes. Kanter created what was then one of the only Electronic Discovery practices in an international accounting firm, originally focusing on recovering and reviewing data from “floppy disks”. In his first such engagement, Kanter and his team recovered the data, analyzed it for its relevance to the dispute and turned that relevant information over to the attorneys representing a fortune 500 company in a highly contested litigation matter.
In 1998, Kanter’s well developed data analytics and skills led to his being tasked with leading the data analytics component of the historic investigation of the bank account records of 26 Swiss banks in an effort to locate and return the funds belonging to the victims of the Holocaust. Kanter said “when we undertook that investigation, there was a great deal of skepticism that we could collect and analyze such a large amount of data in a manner that would lead to locating accounts belonging to victims. One of the most difficult and innovative steps was to use algorithms to match the names listed on bank accounts to the names of the victims of the Holocaust, but we were able to achieve our objectives. Monies were identified and distributed to survivors or their families.”
This new practice area experienced explosive growth and became an essential component of the modern practice of forensic accounting. Today, forensic accounting and data analytics go hand in hand. Data Analytics has evolved dramatically as computing power has increased exponentially. Since 1996, Kanter has used data analytics skills in virtually every client matter he has serviced, from fraud investigations to damage quantification. The ability to obtain, analyze and turn data into useful information has become the cornerstone of the practice of forensic accounting.