FrAudit is the flagship auditing and forensic accounting competition at Strategia'27, the annual business strategy fest of Loyola College, Chennai. The competition is built to take participants beyond textbook learning and into the real-world working environment of a statutory auditor and forensic investigator, forcing teams to operate with incomplete information, conflicting evidence, and tight time pressure.
Who it's for
The competition is open to bona fide undergraduate, postgraduate, and professional-course students pursuing Commerce, Accountancy, Finance, and allied programs. Teams must consist of 2–3 members; individual participation is not permitted at any stage. Team composition is locked after the Round 1 registration deadline, except in documented emergencies approved by the Organizing Committee.
Competition Structure
FrAudit runs across three progressively challenging stages:
- Stage 1 – Online Qualifier: Audit IQ (Concept and Case Challenge). A 30–45 minute online examination covering fundamental and intermediate auditing concepts, audit planning and risk assessment, internal controls and control risks, audit evidence and documentation, audit procedures and assertions, materiality and professional skepticism, fraud risk, ethics and auditor independence, substantive testing, vouching and verification, analytical procedures, and basic forensic audit awareness. Roughly 40–50 objective questions are expected, with about 60% conceptual/application-based and 40% case-study or scenario-based. The top 50 teams qualify for Stage 2.
- Stage 2 – The Red Flag Files (Forensic Investigation Round), 15 February 2026. An offline, in-person 60-minute investigation round. Teams receive a sealed Audit File containing realistic business documents — purchase orders, tax invoices, GST returns, salary registers, bank statements, ledger extracts, inventory records, vendor master, email communications, delivery challans, payment vouchers, journal entries, fixed asset register, audit trail, cash book, and trial balance — and must connect the dots across multiple documents to uncover interconnected fraud schemes. Deliverables include a structured Audit Observation Sheet documenting red flags, cross-referencing quality, reasoning, and recommended audit procedures. The top 10 teams advance to the Grand Finale.
- Stage 3 – Grand Finale: Crooked Books (The Cook & Catch Finale), 15 February 2026. A live two-phase forensic simulation. The top 10 teams are split into Group A (Fraud Accountants) and Group B (Auditors) and paired head-to-head on the same business scenario. In Phase 1 – The Cook (90 minutes), Fraud Accountant teams receive a genuine, internally consistent set of books and must introduce deliberate financial manipulation — window dressing, premature revenue recognition, fictitious or inflated expenses, inventory inflation, fake or shell vendors, payroll manipulation, backdated journal entries, concealed liabilities, or artificial profit creation — while keeping the fraud believable and internally consistent. In Phase 2 – The Catch (90 minutes), the paired Auditor teams receive the anonymized manipulated books and must investigate using vouching, verification, analytical review, and ratio analysis, then document findings, quantify financial impact, and recommend corrective actions and internal control improvements.
Evaluation Criteria
Participants are judged on accuracy and analytical reasoning, professional skepticism, financial statement analysis, quality of audit evidence and documentation, ability to identify fraud and control weaknesses, appropriateness of audit procedures, professional judgment and decision-making, teamwork under time pressure, and clarity and professionalism of reporting. Fraud Accountant teams are additionally assessed on creativity, realism, complexity, ability to conceal, consistency, and documentation quality; Auditor teams on detection accuracy, investigation quality, audit approach, evidence collection, professional skepticism, reporting quality, and root cause analysis.
Rules and Guidelines
Participants must carry valid institutional identification and may be asked to produce it at any stage. Plagiarism, impersonation, misrepresentation, collusion, or any form of dishonest assistance is strictly prohibited. The use of AI tools, chatbots, automated reasoning assistants, internet access, or unauthorized reference material is prohibited unless specifically permitted for a particular round. Participants may communicate only with members of their own team during active competition windows. Only submissions in the officially prescribed format will be evaluated, and once submitted, a submission cannot be edited or resubmitted unless permitted under that round's rules. Any attempt to access confidential case content before a round officially commences may result in disqualification. Decisions of the judging panel and Organizing Committee on scoring, rules, and disputes are final and binding, and the Committee reserves the right to modify format, schedule, scenario content, or rules, with material changes communicated to participants.
Outcome
At the conclusion of the Grand Finale, the strongest performances across the head-to-head matchups determine the Winner, Runner-Up, and Third Place. FrAudit is ultimately a test of analytical thinking, professional skepticism, investigative ability, and the judgment required to distinguish credible financial reporting from deliberate manipulation — from identifying risks in an online qualifier to tracing fraud through complex audit files and finally creating or uncovering manipulated financial statements.
