Newcomb–Benford law helps customs officers to detect fraud in international trade

A naive approach to flagging potential misuse or manipulation of data using the Newcomb-Benford law (NBL) is the following: under the premise that a particular dataset conforms to a specific theoretical distribution (NBL or other variants of the law; e.g., the second leading digit), the strategy is to compare the empirical leading-digit distribution found in the actual data against the expected NBL. In their report, Cerioli et al are able to circumvent these issues by preassessing the conditions under which the NBL should emerge in the context of international trade--that is, the conditions under which the subsequent inferences can be trusted. These authors actually pioneer the application of the NBL to the context of international trade.