The issue of fraudulent financial reporting has drawn much public as well as academic attention. However, most relevant researches
focus on predicting financial distress or bankruptcy. Little emphasis has been placed on exploring the financial reporting
fraud itself. This study addresses the challenge of obtaining an enhanced understanding of the financial reporting fraud through
the approach with the following four phases: (1) to identify a set of financial and corporate governance indicators that are
significantly correlated with fraudulent financial reporting; (2) to use the Growing Hierarchical Self-Organizing Map (GHSOM)
to cluster data from listed companies into fraud and non-fraud subsets; (3) to extract knowledge from the fraudulent financial
reporting through observing the hierarchical relationship displayed in the trained GHSOM; and (4) to provide justification
to the extracted knowledge.
Keywords Financial Reporting Fraud - Growing Hierarchical Self-Organizing Map - Knowledge Extraction