Messod Beneish

Areas of Expertise: Corporate governance, mergers & acquisitions, earnings management, fraud detection and insider trading

Biography:

Messod D. “Daniel” Beneish’s educational background consists of a masters in public accounting from McGill University in 1980, along with an MBA in 1984 and a Ph.D. in 1987 from the University of Chicago. Before attending graduate school, he held a Chartered Accountant license (the equivalent of a certified public accountant, or CPA) and worked as an auditor and consultant for Coopers & Lybrand (the “C” in PwC) in Montreal, Canada.

At Indiana University, where he has been on faculty since 1996, Beneish has taught financial accounting, financial statement analysis, detecting earnings management at the masters level and a doctoral seminar on empirical research. He recently served as co-editor at the European Accounting Review for a special issue themed “New Directions in Earnings Management and Fraud Research,” which was published in 2018. He has also served as keynote speaker at the Inaugural Conference of the U.K. Society of Certified Financial Analysts (July 2015, London, U.K.), and at the 40th Journal of Accounting and Public Policy conference in June 2022 (University of Maryland).

Beneish’s M-Score model has gained acceptance among accounting and investing professionals as a model to detect earnings manipulation. The screening model flags many companies before the public discovers the earnings manipulation. This turns out to be somewhat useful in avoiding the losses that invariably accompany such revelations.