But as you drill down in detail you run out of enough cases to measure properly. Benford's law requires data that is distributed over a wide range--it's going

But as you drill down in detail you run out of enough cases to measure properly. Benford's law requires data that is distributed over a wide range--it's going to find problems with any data that is too granular. Hospital sizes aren't distributed over wide enough a range to apply Benford's law to. This came up not too long ago in looking for voting irregularities--somebody who didn't understand what they were doing applied Benford's law to precinct-level voting data--and of course it failed horribly. Duh! Voting precincts have an optimum size and thus will be pretty clustered around that size. The percent going to each candidate generally won't vary too widely, either--thus giving a substantial clustering of the numbers voting for each candidate. There's nowhere near the range of data to apply Benford's law to.