Summary of the situation
The situation at hand is one in which a former finance official of Thomas Jefferson high school for Science and Technology, who had been responsible for receiving funds and depositing into the school’s account, is accused of stealing a total of $ 279,000 from the school. The finance official had been withdrawing money from the school’s account and also drawing checks in her name.
Accounting procedures and internal controls are present
In this case, there is only one accounting procedure and one internal control present.
The accounting procedure is that the finance official was required to bank all the money that she received, which she did.
The internal control is auditing. We are told that the accounts in question were audited each year.
Controls and procedures which might have prevented the embezzlement from occurring
The following are some practices that might have prevented the embezzlement from occurring:
Segregation of Duties
This refers to assigning different duties to different individuals in such a way that each individual has his or her work checked by another so that mistakes made by one individual can be easily identified and corrected before matters get out of hand.
In the case, it seems there was no separation of duties because it seems that the said financial official was the one authorizing payments, then writing and signing checks. It also seems that no one else was reconciling bank statements, because such a person would have questioned the many payments to the finance official. It would not have been easy for the checks that the finance official in the case was writing to herself to pass through all the stages. There should have been someone reviewing the payments and bank statements every month. The anomaly would have been identified by the person reviewing.
Authorization and Processing of payments
This is an internal control that helps organizations to lay down rules to be followed before payments are made from the organization’s account. If the school had policies regarding who can authorize payments, all the payments that the finance official was making to herself would have been discovered. Ideally, the person authorizing should have been a senior person, who would have made sure that the payments were within the budget. Purchases that had not been included in the approved budget should have been thoroughly scrutinized before payment is made. All payments should have been fully supported by receipts or invoices, and no cash should have been withdrawn via Automatic Teller Machine (ATM) cards (Albrecht, Stice, & Swain, 98).
Managing Restricted Funds
This internal control requires funds that are received for a specific purpose to be spent on the particular activity for which it was meant. The money which was embezzled by the finance officer was meant to support athletics, classes, clubs, and other school activities, and should have been used only for the activities for which it had been collected. The funds should have been controlled in such a manner that withdrawals from the account were authorized by the people responsible for those activities, against an approved budget. The school should have laid down rules describing the circumstances under which that money could be borrowed. The rules should have stated the maximum amount which can be borrowed, the kind of authorization required before borrowing, and the frequency of borrowing. How the borrowed money would be repaid should have also been stated before borrowing, and the board should have been regularly updated on the status of any funds borrowed from that money. This would have ensured that any withdrawal that is not within the budget is properly authorized and adequately followed up (McLaney & Atrill, 103).
Signing of Checks
This internal control requires an organization to establish particular individuals who have the authority to sign checks. No check should be paid by the bank without the signatures of those particular individuals. The number may vary from one organization to another, but usually, they may be two or three. All checks that are higher than a certain pre-determined amount should have been signed by at least two responsible people. The signatories would have then questioned all the payments that were made to the finance official. If the signatories were not regularly available, the school should have considered having a petty cash account with a limited amount of money to be spent on the activities when the signatories are not available. The person who spends the money in the petty cash account should not have access to the rest of the money, which should be kept in a separate account. A responsible person should have reviewed the disbursements from the petty cash account to ensure that they are within the guidelines before replenishing the account (Kimmel, Weygandt, & Kieso, 85).
Works Cited
Albrecht, Steve, James Stice, Stice, Earl, & Monte, Swain. Accounting: Concepts and Applications. Florence: Cengage Learning, 2007.
Kimmel, Paul, Jerry, Weygandt, & Donald, Kieso. Accounting. United States: John Wiley and Sons, 2008).
McLaney, Eddie, & Peter, Atrill. Accounting: an introduction. New Jersey: Financial Times Prentice Hall, 2008.