In Manhattan’s glass towers, the big audit firms take an interest in the method. Deloitte, KPMG, Ernst & Young, PricewaterhouseCoopers. Word spreads through the upper floors and the research and development departments. Internal seminars are held, specialist consultants hired.

Yet adoption remains superficial and patchy. The method, though known, is never truly built into audit processes. It often stays one tool among many, used now and then by a few curious auditors but rarely written into standard procedures. Theoretical knowledge that struggles to make its way into day-to-day practice.

This reluctance to fully embrace the method would have dramatic consequences. Some of the biggest financial scandals of the following years might have been avoided had Benford’s law been applied systematically. The tool existed, but it sat in a drawer while the fraudsters worked undisturbed.

Traditional auditing stayed anchored in random sampling, manual checks and expert intuition. The digital revolution promised by Nigrini and the IRS struggled to take hold in a conservative profession, attached to methods that were tried and tested, but outdated.