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.