Skip to content

Engagement scope

Definition

The defined boundaries of a fraud examination: the organisational units, time period, transaction types, and evidence sources to be examined. Scope is driven by the predication and the working hypothesis; expansion beyond those boundaries requires new predication.

Related terms

Legal hold
A directive from legal counsel instructing relevant people within an organisation to preserve documents, data, and physical items that may be relevant...
Predication
The reasonable basis that justifies opening a fraud examination. The ACFE holds that no examination should begin without adequate predication, meaning a...
Scope creep
The unintended expansion of a penetration test beyond the agreed boundaries, either because testers follow a vulnerability chain into an out-of-scope system...
Spoliation
The destruction, alteration, or concealment of evidence relevant to a legal proceeding. Spoliation can result in adverse inference instructions to a jury,...
Working hypothesis
A precise, falsifiable statement of the fraud scheme suspected, derived from the predication. It names the scheme type, the suspected perpetrator or...

Explained in

Your journey to becoming a forensic professional starts here.

Practice with mock tests, learn from structured notes, and get your questions answered by a global forensic community, all in one place.