The Appointment of the Expertise and Its Place in the Dispute
Forensic accounting — a accounting-and-economic expertise — is governed by the Civil Procedure Code of Georgia. Under Article 162, where a judge lacks special knowledge on a question connected with the examination of a case, the court may, on its own initiative, appoint an expertise at any stage of the examination — only where the clarification of the question is of material significance for the decision of the case and the decision cannot be taken without it; this is fixed by a motivated ruling.
The second route lies in the parties' hands: the parties may independently of the court procure the conduct of an expertise. Such a conclusion is submitted to the court at the stage of the initiation or preparation of the case, and when filing a claim a party has the right to request a deadline for presenting the expert conclusion. Presenting a conclusion at the main hearing is possible only by way of exception — where the need could not objectively have been known at the preparation stage, or where the party for a valid reason could not procure it. The failure to present a conclusion is not a ground for adjourning the examination — the court will simply set a deadline.
The Examination of the Conclusion and the Questioning of the Expert
Under Article 171, the parties and their representatives may review the expert conclusion, and at their request it is published at the court hearing. The parties may express their opinion, and for the clarification and completion of the conclusion the expert may be asked questions — this is the moment where a well-posed question changes the content of the conclusion and where the quality of the forensic analysis is decided.
The order of questioning is also defined: where the expertise was appointed on a party's initiative, the expert is first questioned by the person who presented the conclusion and their representative; an expert appointed on the court's initiative is first questioned by the judge, and the judge may put questions at every moment of the examination. The compilation of the initial base of materials is the party's task: primary documents, accounting registers and the multi-year history of transactions are precisely the background on which the expert conclusion is written, and whose completeness predetermines its reliability. Here the essence of the injured party's position also emerges: the one who has suffered damage can, by presenting their own conclusion and asking the right questions, turn the facts of fraud into quantified figures.
Practical experience says that the success of a forensic analysis rests on three steps: the correct framing of the accounting questions out of the facts of the dispute, the completeness of the initial materials for the conclusion, and the legal assessment of its results. The first step determines what the expert answers; the second — how reliable the answer is; the third — what conclusions the court draws from those answers. Thinking through each step separately allows the economic argumentation to fit precisely into the legal frame of the dispute.