Job Title: Forensic accountant Employers: Accounting firms Openings: Check company websites Salary Cap: $700,000 (partnership in a firm) Number of Jobs: Thousands and growing

One morning a few years ago, forensic accountant Al Vondra was driving to work on Cleveland's Interstate 77 as he always did. But this day was different. As he was driving, all four tires on his Buick LeSabre suddenly exploded. The gas tank hit the ground at 65 miles per hour, and the car came to a grinding halt. Fortunately, nothing exploded, and Vondra was able to get to the side of the road and wait for the police.
    
At the time, Vondra was working with the U.S. Department of Justice to liquidate a $20 million portfolio owned by a group of businessmen engaged in a highly risky and, as it turns out, illegal investment scheme that had targeted retirement funds and several Amish people. The timing of the incident was so suspicious that the Justice Department attorneys on the case asked the F.B.I. to investigate.
    
"They could never prove somebody tried to eliminate me," says Vondra, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers. "But the government eventually prosecuted all the people involved and one of the principals committed suicide."

For Vondra, it was his awakening to just how serious the consequences of his sort of accounting work could be. After all, people don't normally try to kill you for doing their taxes. But as a forensic accountant, it's Vondra's job to see past the squeaky-clean financials corrupt companies present to their investors and find out what is really going on. His job entails much more than simply disentangling confusing numbers on balance sheets, though. As Vondra describes it, tricks straight off of crime shows like CSI and Law and Order can also come in handy.

"When you interview four or five different people and get conflicting information, you have to be able to assess the credibility of the witnesses," he says. "One technique is to warm up to people so that they are more willing to tell you information [but] sometimes you have to be very direct and confront people when you feel they are not being very forthright. Oftentimes stories change over time."

In the wake of accounting scandals and growing investor activism, forensic accounting has become a hot job—membership in the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (A.C.F.E.), which was founded only in 1988, has increased by more than 50 percent since 2003 to 43,000 members.

But Vondra found his niche long before the current boom, beginning work as an auditor at PricewaterhouseCoopers more than 28 years ago. In 1984, one of Vondra's clients, the C.E.O. of a major cruise ship company, suspected that an employee had a set up a side business as a travel agent and was improperly referring customers to his own business. The C.E.O. brought in Vondra to examine the books and interview people to test out his theory, and it turned out to be true.

"I got to be so interested in the idea of investigations and analyzing what was going on in the books…that I continued to pursue it," Vondra says. He started volunteering to work similar cases and projects, and developed his skills in detecting financial fraud. "Back then forensic accounting was something that was not even really discussed by most accountants and companies," he adds.

Vondra's passion eventually carried him to law school to learn more about the law and how to work with attorneys. He now has a C.P.A., a J.D., and has been certified to examine fraud by the A.C.F.E. At PricewaterhouseCoopers, he is the partner in charge of Advisory Services, which specializes in dispute analysis and investigation.

In today's world, Vondra says, "[fraud detection is] really on the radar screen of every single public company in the United States. Accounting has moved from the back page of the Wall Street Journal to the front page."  

Most investigations begin with a tip from a whistleblower or a suspicion of some sort, which prompts the audit committee of a company's board of directors to call in Vondra and his group. They'll begin with high-level interviews and then move on to requesting and examining emails—sometimes as many as one million. He and his team run the emails through programs that search for words and phrases like "illegal," "earnings management," and "manipulate." The programs will call up email strings, which may point the auditors to certain accounting files, which can then be pulled up and scrutinized.  

In the course of his work, Vondra has served as an expert witness in court cases more than 70 times, and has been hired by the S.E.C. in civil cases to explain accounting fraud in terms a jury can understand.
      
Vondra can't release the names of cases he's worked on. But he says the Department of Justice recently hired him after they uncovered a Ponzi scheme being conducted by a former state governor, who was running as much as $1 billion through his personal bank account; the department hired Vondra to figure out how he did it. Vondra has also led 70-person teams in some of the highest-profile accounting scandals in recent years, and helped prosecute several top executives.

"It's way more than about numbers," Vondra says of his job. "I'm a C.P.A.; I'm also a lawyer, and a certified fraud examiner—my job entails all these skills."

---

Also on Portfolio.com:
Multimedia: How to Cook the Books