NEWCOMB BENFORD LAW AND ACCOUNTING AUDIT: A SYSTEMATIC LITERATURE REVIEW

Newcomb Benford's Law - LNB, was conceived by the astronomer and mathematician Simon Newcomb, in 1881. His studies showed that the occurrence of a natural number, spontaneously or randomly, did not occur in the expected proportion of 1/9, but according to a logarithmic distribution. Since then, this law has been tested in many areas of knowledge. In corporate finance, scholars have tested the law to investigate fraud in accounting data. However, there is still no consensus on the effectiveness of LNB in this area. Thus, the objective of this article is to identify the arguments for and against, as well as the research methods and the main findings of research on the application of LNB as an audit tool. For that, a Systematic Literature Review was applied, following the steps of Levy and Ellis (2006). Thus, in addition to information on authorship, models used by the authors to support their conclusions and main findings, research gaps are presented, and the implications for the future of research are discussed.