Who's Minding Your Company's Business?

Are you watching you company’s finances or are you trusting your employees to do it for you?
No matter how trustworthy you consider your bookkeeper or accounting staff, you must establish some system of checks and balances. Answer “yes” or “no” to the following questions to give you some idea of how vulnerable your company is to employee fraud.

1. Your bookkeeper has the authority to approve invoices for payment.
2. Your bookkeeper issues checks and reconciles your checking account.
3. You don’t have a policy to flag unusually high amounts on employee expense
reports.
4. You believe that your employees are honest and never conduct surprise audits.
5. Your employees would be uncomfortable reporting suspicious behavior.

The more “yes” answers you have to this quiz, the more likely you are to be victimized by one of the three most prevalent forms of employee fraud — misappropriation of assets, corruption, and financial statement fraud. While Enron, Worldcom, and other large corporations have received a great deal of publicity for financial statement fraud, in smaller companies the most frequent type of employee theft is misappropriation (payments to fictitious vendors, overpayment to vendors with kickbacks, or checks for unearned overtime).

How can you protect your business? There is no simple answer because each situation is different, but here are some internal control practices that can minimize the opportunities for employee fraud:

1. Separate responsibilities so that:
the person who opens mail with payments doesn’t record receipt of payments
the person who approves invoices doesn’t issue the checks
the person who issues the checks doesn’t open and reconcile the checking
statements
2. Have all financial transactions reviewed and approved by an appropriate
manager
3. Conduct surprise financial audits
4. Develop and enforce a code of ethics with appropriate penalties
5. Encourage employees to report suspicious behavior
6. Establish an anonymous employee hotline if possible
7. Create an atmosphere in which employees feel valued and fairly paid

Fraud can hit your company where it hurts the most — in the bottom line. So, if you don’t mind your business, someone else may do it for you.

How Safe Is Your Company's Wallet

When I was 18, I went to a dance at an Ivy League University. I remember dancing a lot and speaking to several people. Of course, my purse would have been in the way while I danced, so I put it down on one of the chairs without a second thought. It was a nondescript black purse surrounded by many others, and it never occurred to me that it would not be safe.

At the end of the evening when my friends and I were ready to leave, I retrieved the purse. Nothing looked amiss, and it was only when I opened the wallet did I realize what had happened. All of the bills were gone, but fortunately there was enough change to get me home. I felt stupid for being so trusting, and now I guard my wallet much more carefully.

What happened to me happens every day on an even greater scale to businesses. My $30 loss pales in comparison to the losses sustained by businesses every day. According to the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners http://www.acfe.com/ over $650 billion was lost by US businesses in one year as a result of employee fraud.

And it’s not only big businesses such as Enron, WorldCom, and Adelphia that are hurt. An employee of the Miami-Dade Florida Water and Sewer Authority pled guilty to defrauding the agency of $1 million dollars earmarked for bulk mailings. A former bookkeeper for a Scottsdale, Arizona, cryonics company was accused of stealing $177,000 from the company to invest in a bar. In a Chicago suburb, an office manager embezzled $143,000 from an auto parts dealer.

Statistics show that small businesses are more vulnerable and more likely to be hurt by employee theft, and the person most likely to embezzle is frequently the most trusted employee — the employee that comes in early, stays late, and rarely takes a day off. What is perhaps the most horrifying statistic revealed by the ACFE is that most cases are discovered by accident rather than by any system of controls.

How can business owners protect themselves from employee fraud? Read my next posting on this blog for some practical advice.