Nowadays most numerical work is computerised. However, alterations to handwritten dates and numbers can still occur in cases of document fraud.
HR, procurement, bookkeeping and accountancy departments may have to deal with altered numbers. Many types of documents can be involved, over and above the obvious ones such as invoices and receipts. Dates can be changed by the addition of a few strokes of the pen. Prior to the high-tech banking methods of today, cheque raising was rife. In these cases, criminals would increase the amount of money on a cheque, by adding additional zeros or attempting to change the numbers themselves. But of course, they then faced the additional challenge of changing the wording! Alterations to numbers and dates can be a factor in many human resources cases as well as social grant fraud. Companies that still use manual tally sheets to record cash takings may be vulnerable to certain types of alterations in order to hide the theft of cash.
When examining handwritten numbers, answers to questions such as the following can be provided by a forensic document examiner:
Andrea le Sueur is a certified forensic document examiner CFDE® and handwriting expert based in Hout Bay, Cape Town. She is certified by the Scientific Association of Forensic Examiners (SAFE®) (USA).
