Benchmarking Generalization in Financial Statement Fraud Detection: robust evaluation and novel tasks
TL;DR
This work constructs and makes publicly available a comprehensive U.S. company dataset combining financial statements, summarized MD&A text, and fraud labels and achieves the best performance on the challenging CI-FSFD task, demonstrating the critical value of textual data and robust evaluation for reliable financial fraud detection.
Abstract
Financial statement fraud detection (FSFD) is crucial for market integrity but faces challenges from increasingly sophisticated schemes and under-utilized textual data in financial reports. Existing methods often rely on random data splits, leading to overoptimistic performance estimates that do not reflect real-world generalization to new companies or future periods. To address this recurring problem with the state of the art, we propose a robust FSFD framework leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to integrate both structured financial data and unstructured textual information from financial reports. We provide a more realistic evaluation through a novel and challenging benchmark task called Company-Isolated FSFD (CI-FSFD). We construct and make publicly available a comprehensive U.S. company dataset combining financial statements, summarized MD&A text, and fraud labels. Our approach achieves the best performance on the challenging CI-FSFD task, demonstrating the critical value of textual data and robust evaluation for reliable financial fraud detection.