Open Dental's open-source architecture makes it one of the most flexible — and for knowledgeable embezzlers, one of the most exploitable — practice management systems in dentistry. Its audit log is comprehensive by design, but interpreting that log in the context of an embezzlement investigation requires both forensic methodology and deep familiarity with how Open Dental records and modifies transactions.
Prosperident's investigators have conducted forensic reviews of Open Dental installations across North America. We know how the system behaves under normal conditions, and we know what manipulation looks like when it appears in the data.
Open Dental maintains an audit log that captures every significant action taken within the system: payments posted and deleted, adjustments applied, insurance claims processed, procedure codes modified, and user session activity. Each record includes a timestamp, a user identifier, and the nature of the change.
Our review goes beyond the standard audit log reports. We examine the underlying database — transaction by transaction — to identify patterns that surface-level reporting would miss entirely.
Every review is personally conducted and signed off by our CEO, a Certified Fraud Examiner with over 35 years of dental embezzlement investigation experience. You receive a written forensic report documenting our methodology, findings, and a quantified loss estimate. Our reports have been used in criminal prosecutions, civil litigation, and insurance recovery proceedings involving Open Dental practices.
Because Open Dental is open-source, its database schema is fully documented — which means our investigators can go deeper into the underlying data than is possible with some proprietary systems. This is a significant forensic advantage when the evidence matters.
Our Open Dental review is conducted remotely from a data export you provide. We do not require on-site access, and the review is conducted covertly — your suspected employee is unaware that an investigation is underway. This protects your legal position and maximizes the evidence we can document before any confrontation occurs.
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Open Dental's open-source relational database gives investigators access to raw transaction data unavailable on most proprietary systems. Our team queries the underlying data directly — examining Payment records, PaySplit allocations, Adjustment entries by type, and Deposit records at the field level. We review the Security Log for unauthorized permission escalations, examine the Claim tracking module for suspicious write-offs, and cross-reference Procedure Log entries against posted collections. Because Open Dental stores its data in standard SQL tables, our investigators can reconstruct the complete financial history of a practice with a level of precision that is simply not possible on closed systems.
Wendy Askins, Supervising Examiner at Prosperident, brings extensive experience with Open Dental investigations. The flexibility that makes Open Dental attractive to cost-conscious practices is the same flexibility that sophisticated embezzlers exploit — Wendy understands exactly how that openness is abused, where the evidence trails are preserved, and how to reconstruct a complete picture of financial misconduct from the raw database.
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