A Well Defined Purchase Approval and Payment System
There is a great difference in attitude in the church environment between receipts and disbursements. While churches exercise extreme vigilance over the “inflow” of funds into the church, many have a rather cavalier attitude towards the “outflow”.
Churches also tend to rely on a few “fraud prevention” methods which in my opinion provide little more protection than a security blanket. They may give a warm and fuzzy feeling, but are no help in a real crisis. The two I hear most often are the requirement of dual signatures for checks over a predetermined amount and the requirement that a check request form be filled out before anyone gets paid. It is not uncommon for these to be the only two “fraud prevention” controls exercised over cash disbursements. Churches that rely on methods this simple are unaware of two basic facts.
- First, dual signatures and homemade check requests are absolutely no match for an ethically challenged employee with the courage to forge.
- Second, and this may be the most surprising, many of the larger and more spectacular embezzlements involve tampering with the church’s cash outflow, not the inflow.
Key: While no system is foolproof (especially if collusion is involved) the best fraud prevention practice in regard to disbursements, is to segregate the bill paying tasks between as many people as possible. Some of the more important tasks to distribute are:
- Payment approval
- Receiving of goods
- Check preparation
- Check signing
- Bill mailing
- General ledger maintenance
Unfortunately, very few churches have enough employees to split all of these tasks up. So what can be done?
Just as with cash receipts, a good place to start is by holding another brain-storming session in which the church’s procurement processes are analyzed. Flow-charting is a very useful tool in this exercise. Then, to the best of the church’s capabilities, the tasks should be distributed among several employees and volunteers. But even after this process, most churches will have more tasks than people to give them to.
But, there are other steps that can be taken. Although they take place after-the-fact, these practices still provide strong measures of fraud prevention.
- First, someone outside the business office could be assigned the task of reconciling the bank account monthly. This could be another employee, the business administrator, or a competent volunteer. The reconciliation should not solely be a “balancing” of the checkbook but should also include a close inspection of the cancelled checks for endorsements and signatures and an analysis of outstanding items. Online banking and remote access has made this practice even more efficient and practical, as volunteers do not have to come to the church office to do the work.
- Another step is to perform an analysis of the church’s check register by exporting it to an electronic spreadsheet and sorting by vendor. It is surprising how quickly check writing “anomalies” can be detected using this procedure. This practice should also be performed periodically.
Although not foolproof or guaranteed to catch everything, these two practices serve a bigger purpose. Key: They are loud and clear advertising to any and all, that someone is looking. This will force a potential thief to at least stop and ask himself; “Do I feel lucky today?”
